(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

(gentle music) >> Good morning from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tons of thousands of people today. Really kicks off the event. Big keynote that I think is probably just wrapping up. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, this is going to be an action packed week on theCUBE no doubt. We talked with so many different companies. Every company's a software company these days but we're also seeing a lot of companies leaving software that can help them operate more efficiently in the background. >> Yeah, well some things haven't changed at Reinvent. A lot of people here, you know, back to 2019 highs and I think we exceeded those two hour keynotes. Peter DeSantis last night talking about new Graviton instances and then Adam Selipsky doing the typical two hour keynote. But what was different he was a lot more poetic than we used to hear from Andy Jassy, right? He was talking about the universe as an analogy for data. >> I loved that. >> Talked about ocean exploration as for the security piece and then exploring into the Antarctic for, you know, better chips, you know? So yeah, I think he did a good job there. I think a lot of people might not love it but I thought it was very well done. >> I thought so too. We're having kicking off a great day of live content for you all day today. We've got Eleanor Dorfman joining us, the sales leader at Retool. Eleanor, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So let's talk a little bit about Retool. I was looking on your LinkedIn page. I love the tagline, build custom internal tools best. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Talk to us a little bit about the company you recently raised, series C two. Give us the backstory. >> Yeah, so the company was founded in 2017 by two co-founders who are best friends from college. They actually set out to build a FinTech company, a payments company. And as they were building that, they needed to build a ton of custom operations software that goes with that. If you're going to be managing people's money, you need to be able to do refunds. You need to be able to look up accounts, you need to be able to detect fraud, you need to do know your customer operations. And as they were building the sort of operations software that supports the business, they realized that there were patterns to all of it and that the same components were used at and again. And had the insight that that was actually probably a better direction to go in than recreating Venmo, which was I think the original idea. And that actually this is a problem every company has because every company needs operations engineering and operations software to run their business. And so they pivoted and started building Retool which is a platform for building custom operations software or internal tools. >> Dave: Good pivot. >> In hindsight, actually probably in the moment as well, was a good pivot. >> But you know, when you talk about some of those things, refunds, fraud, you know, KYC, you know, you think of operations software, you think of it as just internal, but all those things are customer facing. >> Eleanor: Yep. >> Right so, are we seeing as sort of this new era? Is that a trend that you guys, your founders saw that hey, these internal operations can be pointed at customers to support what, a better customer service, maybe even generate revenue, subscriptions? >> I think it's a direction we're actually heading now but we're just starting to scratch the surface of that. The focus for the last five years has very much been on this operations software and sort of changing the economics of developing it and making it easy and fast to productize workflows that were previously being done in spreadsheets or hacky workarounds and make it easier for companies to prioritize those so they can run their business more efficiently. >> And where are you having your customer conversations these days? Thinking of operations software in the background, but to Dave's point, it ends up being part of the customer experience. So where are you having your customer conversations, target audience, who's that persona? >> Mainly developers. So we're working almost exclusively with developer teams who have backlogs and backlogs of internal tools requests to build that sales teams are building manual forecasts. Support teams are in 19 different tools. Their supply chain teams are using seven different spreadsheets to do demand forecasting or freight forwarding or things like that. But they've never been able to be prioritized to the top of the list because customer facing software, revenue generating software, always takes prioritization. And in this economic environment, which is challenging for many companies right now, it's important to be able to do more with less and maximize the productivity especially of high value employees like engineers and developers. >> So what would you say the biggest business outcomes are? If the developer is really the focus, productivity is the- >> Productivity. It's for both, I would say. Developer productivity and being able to maximize your sort of R and D and maximize the productivity of your engineers and take away some of the very boring parts of the job. But, so I would say developer productivity, but then also the tools and the software that they're building are very powerful for end users. So I would say efficiency and productivity across your business. >> Across the business. >> I mean historically, you know, operations is where we focused IT and code. How much of the code out there is dedicated to sort of operations versus that customer facing? >> So I think it would actually be, it's kind of surprising. We have run a few surveys on this sort of, we call them the state of engineering time, and focusing on what developers are spending their time on. And a third of all code that is being written today is actually for this internal operations software. >> Interesting. And do you guys have news at the show? Are you announcing anything interesting or? >> Yeah, so our focus historically, you sort of gave away with one of your early questions, but our focus has always been on this operations, this building web applications on building UIs on top of databases and APIs and doing that incredibly fast and being able to do it all in one place and integrate with as any data source that you need. We abstract away access authentication deployment and you build applications for your internal teams. But recently, we've launched two new products. We're actually supporting more external use cases and more customer facing use cases as well as automating CRON jobs, ETL jobs alerting with the new retail workflows product. So we're expanding the scope of operations software from web applications to also internal operations like CRON jobs and ETL jobs. >> Explain that. Explain the scourge of CRON jobs to the audience. >> Yeah, so operations software businesses run on operations software. It's interesting, zooming out, it's actually something you said earlier as well. Every company has become a software company. So when you think about software, you tend to think about here. Very cool software that people are selling. And software that you use as a consumer. But Coca-Cola for example, has hundreds of software engineers that are building tools to make the business run for forecasting, for demand gen, for their warehouse distribution and monitoring inventory. And there's two types of that. There's the applications that they build and then the operations that have to run behind that. Maybe a workflow that is detecting how many bottles of Coca-Cola are in every warehouse and sending a notification to the right person when they're out or when they, a refill is very strong, but you know when you need a refill. So it does that, it takes those tasks, those jobs that run in the background and enables you to customize them and build them very rapidly in a code first way. >> So some of the notes that you guys provided say that there's over 500 million software apps that are going to be built in the next few years alone. That's tremendous. How much of that is operation software? >> I mean I think at least a third of that, if not more. To the point where every company is being forced to maximize their resources today and operational efficiency is the way to do that. And so it can become a competitive advantage when you can take the things that humans are doing in spreadsheets with 19 open tabs and automate that. That saves hours a day. That's a significant, significant driver of efficiency and productivity for a business >> It does, and there's direct correlation to the customer experience. The use experience. >> Almost certainly. When you think about building support tooling, I was web chat, chatting on the with Gogo wifi support on my flight over here and they asked for my order number and I sent it and they looked up my account and that's a custom piece of software they were using to look up the account, create a new account for me, and restore my second wifi purchase. And so when you think about it, you're actually, even just as a consumer, interacting with this custom software on the day time. And that's because that's what companies use to have a good customer experience and have an efficient business. >> And what's the relationship with AWS? You guys started, I think you said 2017, so you obviously started in the cloud, but I'm particularly interested in from a seller perspective, what that's like. Working with Amazon, how's that affected your business? >> Yeah, I mean so we're built on AWS, so we're customers and big fans. And obviously like from a selling perspective, we have a ton of integrations with AWS so we're able to integrate directly into all the different AWS products that people are using for databases, for data warehouses, for deployment configurations, for monitoring, for security, for observability, we can basically fit into your existing AWS stack in order to make it as seamless integration with your software so that building in Retool is just as seamless as building it on your own, just much, much faster. >> So in your world, I know you wanted to but, in your world is it more analytics? is it more transactional, sort of? Is it both? >> It's all of the above. And I think what's, over Thanksgiving, I was asked a lot to explain what Retool did with people who were like, we just got our first iPhone. And so I tried to explain with an example because I have yet to stumble on the perfect metaphor. But the example I typically use is DoorDash is a customer of ours. And for about three years, and three years ago, they had a problem. They had no way of turning off delivery in certain zip codes during storms. Which as someone who has had orders canceled during a storm, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. And the way it worked is that they had operation team members manually submitting requests to engineers to say there's a storm in this zip code and an engineer would run a manual task. This didn't scale with Doordash as they were opening in new countries all over the world that have very different weather patterns. And so they looked, they had one, they were sort of confronted with a choice. They could buy a piece of software out of the box. There is not a startup that does this yet. They could build it by hand, which would mean scoping the requirements designing a UI, building authentication, building access controls, putting it into a, putting it into a sprint, assigning an engineer. This would've taken months and months. And then it would take just as long to iterate on it or they could use Retool. So they used Retool, they built this app, it saved, I think they were saying up to two years of engineering time for this one application because of how quickly it was. And since then they've built, I think 50 or 60 more automating away other tasks like that that were one out of spreadsheets or in Jira or in Slack notifications or an email saying, "Hey, could you please do this thing? There's a storm." And so now they use us for dozens and dozens of operations like that. >> A lot of automation and of course a lot of customer delight on the other end of the spectrum as you were talking about. It is frustrating when you don't get that order but it's also the company needs to be able to have the the tools in place to automate to be able to react quickly. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Because the consumers are, as we know, quite demanding. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned the tagline in the beginning, build custom internal tools fast. You just gave us a great example of DoorDash. Huge business outcomes they're achieving but how fast are we talking? How fast can the average developer build these internal tools? >> Well, we've been doing a fun thing at our booth where we ask people what a problem is and build a tool for them while we're there. So for something lightweight, you can build it in 10 minutes. For something a little more complex, it can take up to a few weeks depending on what the requirements are. But we all have people who will be on a call with us introducing them to our software for the first time and they'll start telling us about their problems and in the background we'll be building it and then at the end we're like, is this what you meant? And they're like, we'd like to add that to our cart. And obviously, it's a platform so you can't do that. But we've been able to build applications on a call before while people are telling us what they need. >> So fast is fast. >> I would say very fast, yeah. >> Now how do you price? >> Right now, we have a couple different plans. We actually have a motion where you can sign up on our website and get started. So we have a free plan, we've got plans for startups, and then we've got plans all the way up to the enterprise. >> Right. And that's a subscription pricing kind of thing? >> Subscription model, yes. >> So I get a subscription to the platform and then what? Is there also a consumption component? >> Exactly. So there's a consumption component as well. So there's access to the platform and then you can build as many applications as you need. Or build as many workflows. >> When you're having customer conversations with prospects, what do you define as Retool's superpowers? You're the sales leader. What are some of those key superpowers that you think really differentiate Retool? >> I do think, well, the sales team first and foremost, but that's not a fair answer. I would say that people are a bit differentiator though. We have a lot of very talented people who are have a ton of domain expertise and care a ton about the customer outcomes, which I do actually think is a little more rare than it should be. But we're one of the only products out there that's built with a developer first mindset, a varied code first mindset, built to integrate with your software development life cycle but also built with the security and robustness that enterprise companies require. So it's able to take an enterprise grade software with a developer first approach while still having a ton of agility and nimbleness which is what people are really craving as the earth keeps moving around them. So I would say that's something that really sets us apart from the field. >> And then talk about some of the what developers are saying, some of the feedback, some of the responses, and maybe even, I know we're just on day one of the show, but any feedback from the booth so far? >> We've had a few people swing by our booth and show us their Retool apps, which is incredibly cool. That's my absolute favorite thing is encountering a Retool application in the wild which happens a lot more than I would've thought, which I shouldn't say, but is incredibly rewarding. But people love it. It's the reason I joined is I'd never heard someone have a product that customers talked about the way they talk about Retool because Retool enables them to do things. For some folks who use it, it enables them to do something they previously couldn't do. So it gives them super powers in their job and to triple their impact. And then for others, it just makes things so fast. And it's a very delightful experience. It's very much built by developers, for developers. And so it's built with a developer's first mindset. And so I think it's quite fun to build in Retool. Even I can build and Retool, though not well. And then it's extremely impactful and people are able to really impact their business and delight their coworkers which I think can be really meaningful. >> Absolutely. Delighting the coworkers directly relates to delighting the customers. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> Those customer experience, employee experience, they're like this. >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> They go hand in hand and the employee experience has to be outstanding to be able to delight those customers, to reduce churn, to increase revenue- >> Eleanor: Exactly. >> And for brand reputation. >> And it also, I think there is something as someone who is customer facing, when my coworkers and developers I work with build tools that enable me to do my job better and feel better about my own performance and my ability to impact the customer experience, it's just this incredibly virtuous cycle. >> So Retool.com is where folks can go to learn more and also try that subscription that you said was free for up to five users. >> Yes, exactly. >> All right. I guess my last question, well couple questions for you. What are some of the things that excited you that you heard from Adam Selipsky this morning? Anything from the keynote that stood out in terms of- >> Dave: Did you listen to the keynote? >> I did not. I had customer calls this morning. >> Okay, so they're bringing- >> East coast time, east coast time. >> One of the things that will excite you I think is they're connecting, making it easier to connect their databases. >> Eleanor: That would very much exciting. >> Aurora and Redshift, right? Okay. And they're making it easier to share data. I dunno if it goes across regions, but they're doing better integration. >> Amazing. >> Right? And you guys are integrating with those tools, right? Those data platforms. So that to me was a big thing for you guys. >> It is also and what a big thing Retool does is you can build a UI layer for your application on top of every single data source. And you hear, it's funny, you hear people talk about the 360 degree review of the customer so much. This is another, it's not our primary value proposition, but it is certainly another way to get there is if you have data from their desk tickets from in Redshift, you have data from Stripe, from their payments, you have data from Twilio from their text messages, you have data from DataDog where they're having your observability where you can notice analytics issues. You can actually just use Retool to build an app that sits on top of that so that you can give your support team, your sales team, your account management team, customer service team, all of the data that they need on their customers. And then you can build workflows so that you can do automated customer engagement reports. I did a Slack every week that shows what our top customers are doing with the product and that's built using all of our automation software as well. >> The integration is so important, as you just articulated, because every, you know, we say every company's a software company these days. Every company's a data company. But also, the data democratization that needs to happen to be able for lines of business so that data moves out of certain locked in functions and enables lines of business to use it. To get that visibility that you were just talking about is really going to be a competitive advantage for those that survive and thrive and grow in this market. >> It's able to, I think it's first it's visibility, but then it's action. And I think that's what Retool does very uniquely as well is it can take and unite the data from all the places, takes it out of the black box, puts it in front of the teams, and then enables them to act on it safely and securely. So not only can you see who might be fraudulent, you can flag them as fraud. Not only can you see who's actually in danger, you can click a button and send them an email and set up a meeting. You can set up an approval workflow to bring in an exec for engagement. You can update a password for someone in one place where you can see that they're having issues and not have to go somewhere else to update the password. So I think that's the key is that Retool can unlock the data visibility and then the action that you need to serve your customers. >> That's a great point. It's all about the actions, the insights that those actions can be acted upon. Last question for you. If you had a billboard that you could put any message that you want on Retool, what would it say? What's the big aha? This is why Retool is so great. >> I mean, I think the big thing about Retool is it's changing the economics of software development. It takes something that previously would've been below the line and that wouldn't get prioritized because it wasn't customer facing and makes it possible. And so I would say one of two billboards if I could be a little bit greedy, one would be Retool changed the economics of software development and one would be build operations software at the speed of thought. >> I love that. You're granted two billboards. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Those are both outstanding. Eleanor, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for talking to us about Retool. >> Eleanor: Thank you. >> Operations software and the massive impact that automating it can make for developers, businesses alike, all the way to the top line. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live, emerging, and enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've been showcasing all the great content about Web3 and what's going around the corner for Web4. Of course, Unstoppable Domains is one of the big growth stories in the business. Brad Kam, the Co-founder is here with me, of Unstoppable Domains, Brad, great to see you, thanks for coming on this showcase. >> Thanks, pleasure for having me. >> So you have a lot of history in the Web3. They're calling it now, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now you're the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. You're seeing the mainstream, I would say mainstream scene, Superbowl commercials, okay? You're seeing it everywhere. So it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos, companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe, it is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's going on with the trend, and where does Unstoppable fit in and where do you guys tie in here? >> I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then NFTs and what Unstoppable Domain is doing. It's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank, no one else. You know, you can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is, assets beyond just currencies. So NFTs, digital art. What we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for Web3 and each individual domain name is an NFT. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride over the past 10 years. >> It's fun because, you know, on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto. It's interesting. Price of Bitcoin, I won't say that how low it was. But then you saw the ICO Wave, the token started coming in. You started seeing much more engineering focus, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of this. So I got to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on, because Unstoppable has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time, it is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now that's in market that you're seeing the most traction on? >> Yeah, so it's really about, so whenever you interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters long, they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream if you have to copy and paste these things around. If I'm getting ready to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to, and I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical. People have kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was, doing kind of like what DNS did, which is, instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses, this long random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name like a keyword, something that's easy to remember. You know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses. And yeah, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, you know, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it. Call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. Just not the way of moving billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you just point out, make it easier. When you have these new waves, these shifts, we saw it with the web pages. More and more web pages were coming on, more online users. They called it the online populations growing. Here, the same thing's happening. And if the focus is on ease of use, making things simpler to understand, and reducing the step it takes to do things, right? This is kind of what's going on and with the developer community, and what Ethereum has done really well is, brought in the developers. So that's the convergence of all the action. And so, when you (John chuckles) so that's where you're at right now. How do you go forward from here? Obviously, there's business development deals to do, you guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? >> So I think the way to think about an NFT domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on Web3. So, it's going to have a lot of different context. So it's kind of like your Venmo account, where you could send me money to brad.crypto, can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at brad.crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook O oth, where I can log into DApps and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity idea. And it's the same form of identity across all your apps. That's the thing that's new here. So, yeah, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important than a lot of, you know, your listeners think is that, everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in. Twitter just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of, every app's going to have a wallet. And it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >> I think there's a couple things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this concept of DApps or decentralized applications, DApps or depending on what you call it. This is applications. And that take advantage of the architecture, and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data that you are the product. Here, the users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here, right? That's what's happening. Is that right? >> Totally, totally. And so, it all starts. I mean, DApp is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this, like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password, where the data is stored inside of that app. Like inside of Facebook. So that's the only real, like, core underneath difference to keep in mind, signing in with the wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works. Because I have this key, this private key, it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So, if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. That's because Twitter had all the data. And so, you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person. It's a completely different security model. It's way better for users to have that. But, if you're thinking from the user perspective, what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it, and I'm going to move around on the internet, logging in with my Web3 username, my NFT domain name, and I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use 100 different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So, the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works and- >> So that's a huge point. So let's double down on that for one more second. This is a huge point. I want to get your thoughts. So I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or ability to move around with your identity in this case, your Unstoppable Domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be like Facebook, where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or they're certainly continuate their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >> Yeah, and what's going to happen is, as users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in Web3. So you have your username and you have your profile and you have certain badges of activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that, and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because it started with the user. And so, the user is starting to collect all this valuable data, and then apps are saying, well, hey, let me give you a special experience based on that. But the real thing, and this is like the core, I mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea, in general. If you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition in Web2 for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what Web3 is really allowing is, this wide open competition. And that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for Web3 to get better than Web2. You know, it's very, very early days. But the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like it's just so much better for consumers when this happens. >> I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is, first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters, it's not Unicode for the geeks out there. But that's limiting too, it limits you to be on a site. And so, I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if... And that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces that could be anywhere. So if you have ID, I'm just kind of thinking it forward here. But if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace, two-sided marketplace anywhere. An app can provide that, if the community's robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplaces? >> So I think it all comes down. So identity is just this huge problem in Web2. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is 'cause you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're in the Web3 paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true 100%. You can know that I have used Uniswap in the past 30 days, and OpenSea in the past 30 days. You can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this asset. So having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And you can still know that it's true. And that concept is going to be what enables what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because- >> And exchange value with smart contracts and other with no middle men involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right, so let me ask you a question on that. Because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS, now you got this. There's a lot of problems with Web2, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots. Bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots, and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was, in an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without having your name, kind of- >> It's going to be 100s of check marks, but exactly. 'Cause there's so many different things that you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, you know, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because Web2 has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles they were deleting per year. So it's just a total- >> And they spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up, to think that's the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in these siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data, so you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you guys are saying is, if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay, that's time, that's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours. And that's immutables on the blockchain, you can store it and then make that permanent and add to it. >> Exactly. >> That's a time based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >> Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legitimate user. And anybody can look that up. I mean, we can we go look it up together right now on Etherscan, it would take a minute. >> Yeah, (indistinct). Yeah, I'm a big fan, I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are going to do really well. Congratulations, I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com is one and Opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? Let's start with blockchain.com. >> Yeah, so the whole thing here is that, this identity standard for Web3 apps need to choose to support it. So, you know, we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this identity standard. Some of the largest and probably most popular companies to have done this are, blockchain.com, for example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people if we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses. And it's not just one, like we want to give you 10, 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just no way people are going to be able to do that without having a user name. So, that's why we're really excited about what blockchain.com's doing. They want to train users that this is the way you should use the tech. >> Yeah, and certainly no one wants to remember. I remember how writing down all my... You know, I was never a big wallet fan 'cause of all the hacks I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I kick the can who's going to find it, right? So again, these are all important things. Your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about Opera. That's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser that people know what it is. What are they doing different? Almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with what they touch. >> Yeah, so this is one of those things that's a little bit easier and I strongly encourage everybody to go and try DApps after this. 'Cause this is going to be one of those concepts, it can be a little easier if you try it than if you hear about it. But the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website's going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so Opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names for payments and for websites. So, you can type in brad.crypto and you can send me money, or you can type in brad.crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the idea is that, browsers have this kind of superpower in Web3. And what I think is going to happen, Opera and Brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. What I think is going to happen is that, these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >> I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a DApps as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Venmo, let me make my cash. Same concept here. But built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore it's a reader, a DApp reader, basically with a wallet. All right, so what does this mean for you guys and the marketplace? You got Opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. Who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say theCUBE wants to do NFTs, and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we? We have to wait or is there a... I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do people engage with Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to Web3. So there's, I think a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was DApps. And we now have this login with ensemble domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it, because it's your choice and you're in control. And so, that would be another thing. Like, if you all launch a DApps, we should absolutely have login with Unstoppable there. >> Yeah, there's so much headroom here. You got a short term solution with exchange. Get that distribution, I get that, that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign in single sign in concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay, future, tell us something we don't know about Unstoppable Domains that people might be interested in. >> I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that. And apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because you gave 'em that information. So that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >> You know, it's interesting, Brad. You bring trust, you bring quality verified data, choose intelligence software and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does with that. Cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean, just in mind blowing. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Great stuff. Brad, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. The Co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, Brad Kam. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE's Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks for having me. (bright upbeat music)

>>Oh, welcome to this cube unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John for your host of the cube and showcasing all the great content about web three. And what's around the corner for web. For of course, stoppable domains is one of the big growth stories in the business bread. Can the co-founders here with me have ensembles mains break. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the showcase. >>So you have a lot of history in the, in the web three, they're calling it net, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now, the co-founder was titled domains. You seeing the mainstream, I would say main street scene, super bowl commercials. Okay. You're seeing it everywhere. So it is, it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe. It is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's what's going on with the trend. And where does unstoppable fit in? Where do you guys tie in here? >>I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then in FTEs and what unstoppable domains is doing, it's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank. No one else. You can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is assets beyond just currencies. So, and if T is digital art, what we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for web three and each individual domain name is a is an NFT. But yeah, it's a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a crazy ride over the past. >>It's fun because you on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto is interesting price of Bitcoin. I won't say that how low it was, but then you saw, you saw the, you know, the ICO way, the token started coming in, you started seeing much more engineering, focused, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of it. So I had to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on because ensemble has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time. It is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now? That's in market that you're seeing the most traction on. >>Yeah. So it's really about, so whenever you inter interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters, long they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think if people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream, if you have to copy and paste these things around, if I'm getting to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to. And I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical people. Who've kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was doing kind of like what DNS did, which is instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses this long, random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name, like a keyword, something that's easy to remember, you know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses and yeah, it's just, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it, call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. I'm just not the way moving, you know, billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things you just pointed out, make it easier. One of these, when you have these new waves, these shifts we saw with the web web pages, more and more web pages were coming on more online users, they call the online population is growing here, the same thing's happening. And the focus is on ease of use, making things simple, to understand and reducing the step it takes to do things, right. This is kind of, kind of what is going on and with the developer community and what a theory has done really well is brought in the developers. So that's the, that's the convergence of all the action. And so when you, so that's where you're at right now, how do you go forward from here? Obviously see this business development deals to do. You guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? Okay. >>So I think the, the, the, the way to, the way to think about, and, and T domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on web three. So it's gonna have a lot of different contexts. It's kind of like your, your Venmo account, where you could send me money to Brad dot crypto can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at Brad dot crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook OAuth, where I can log into ADAPs and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these, all of these different, all these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity, this identity idea. And it's the same identity across all your apps. >>That's the thing that's kinda, that's new here. So, so yeah, that's the, that's the really, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important, a lot of, you know, your, your listeners thing is that everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in Twitter, just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of. Every app is going to have a wallet, and it's going to really, it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >>I think there's a couple of things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this constant adapts or decentralized applications or dimension when you call it, this is applications and that take advantage of, of the architecture and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data. The, you are the product here. The users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here. Right. That's what's happening. Is that right now? >>Totally, totally. And, and so it all starts, I mean, DAP is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password where the data is stored inside of that app, like inside of Facebook. So that's, that's the only real, like core underneath difference to keep in mind signing in with a wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works, because I have this, this key, this private key it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. >>That's because Twitter had all the data. And so you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person, it's a completely different security model. It's, it's way better for users to have that. But if you're thinking from the user perspective what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it. And I'm gonna move around on the internet, logging in with my web three username, my, my, my NFT domain name. And I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use a hundred different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works. >>So that's the huge point. So let's just, let's double down on that for one more. Second, this is huge point. I want to get your thoughts. I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or, or, or the ability to move around with your identity in this case, your unstoppable domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be Facebook where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or are certainly continually their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >>Yeah. And what's going to happen is, is users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in web three. So you have your username and you have your, your profile and you have certain badges of, you know, activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because I, it started with the user as, or the user is starting to collect all this valuable data. And then apps are saying, well, Hey, let me give you a special experience based on that, but the real thing, and this is like, this is like the core mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea. In general, you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition on, on, in web two for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what web three is really allowing is this wide open competition. And, and that is what, that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for, for, for web three to get better than web two. You know, it's very, very early days, but the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like you can just, it's just so much better for consumers when this happened. >>I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters. It's not union code for, for the geeks out there, but that's limiting to its limits you to be on a site. And so I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if, and that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces, that could be anywhere. So if you have a ID and just kind of thinking it forward here, but if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace two-sided marketplace anywhere. And app can provide that if the community is robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplace? >>So I think it all comes down. So I identity is just this huge problem in web two. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is because you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get, to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're, if you're in the web three paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true. A hundred percent. You can know that I have used unit swab in the past 30 days and open, see in the past 30 days, you can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this certain asset. So all of having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. >>And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, Hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And, and you can still know that it's true. And, and that is that concept is going to be what enables, what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because of >>Exchange and exchange value with smart contracts and other no middlemen involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right. So let me ask you a question on that, because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or the, or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS. Now you got this, there's a lot of problems with web two, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots, bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without your name, >>Kind of, it's good. It's going to be hundreds of check marks, but exactly, because there's so many different things that you're going to want to be, you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right. That's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's, what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, I, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because a web tool has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles. They were deleting per you know, per year. So it's just a total. >>They spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up the thing. This is the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in new siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data. So you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you're saying is if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay. That's time. That's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours and that's immutable. It's on the blockchain. You can store it and make that permanent and add to it. Exactly. That's, that's a time-based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can, can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >>Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, Hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had, you know, head has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legit legitimate user and anybody can look that up. I mean, we could go look it up together right now on, on ether scan. It would take, you know, a minute. >>Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. I'm a big fan. I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are gonna do really well. Congratulations. I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com has won an opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? We'll start with blockchain.com. >>Yeah. So the whole thing here is that this identity standard for web three apps need to choose to support it. So we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this, to support this identity standard. Some of the, some of the, the, the largest, and probably, you know, most, most popular companies to have done. This are blockchain.com. For example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And, and, and this is, this is, this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, you know, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people? If we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses, and it's not just one, like we want to give you 10 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just, it's just, it's just no way people are gonna be able to do that without, without having a username. So that's why we're really excited about, about what blockchain that comes through. And they, they, they want to train users that this is the way you should use it. >>Yeah. And certainly no one wants to remember. I remember writing down all my writing. I, I'm not, I was never a big wallet fan cause all the hacks, I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I, I kick the can I'm, who's going to find it. Right? So again, these are all important things, your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about opera. And that's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser and people know what it is, what are they doing? Different almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with, what they touch. >>So this is, this is one of those things. That's a little bit easier. And I strongly encourage everybody to go and try dApps after this. Cause this is going to be one of those concepts to be a little easier. If you, if you try it, then if you hear about it, but the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website is going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names, for payments and for websites. So you can type in Brad dot crypto and you can send me money or you can type in Brad dot crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the, that's the idea is that browsers have this kind of super power in a web three. And what I think is going to happen opera and brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. But I think is going to happen is that these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >>I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a D app as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Ben, let me make my cash. Same concept here, but built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore. It's a, a reader, a D app reader, basically with a wallet. All right. So, so what does this mean for you guys in the marketplace? You've got opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com, blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. How, what, who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say the cube wants to do NFTs and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we have to wait? Or is there a, I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do we, how do people engage with unstoppable Dwayne's >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're, you know, if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to, to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to web three. So there's, I think a lot of, a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the, the, the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was dabs. And we now have this login with unstoppable domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it because it's your choice and you're in control. And so that would be, that would be another thing. Like if you all launch a DAP, we should absolutely have log-in with unstoppable. >>Yeah. There's so much headroom here. You've got a short-term solution with exchange. Get that distribution. I get that that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign-on single sign-on concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay. Future, tell us something we don't know about ensemble domains that people might be interested in. >>I think it's really, I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that and apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because, because you gave them that information. So that's the that's, that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Brad, you bring trust, you bring quality verified data to intelligence, software, and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does, what that, cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean just in mindblowing, I mean, it's pretty crazy great stuff, Brad. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Co-founder unstoppable domains, Brad camp. Thanks for stopping by the cubes. Showcase with unstoppable domains.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation with 40 net. I'm your host. Lisa Martin, Derek Minky is back. He's the chief security insights and global threat alliances at 40 minutes, 40 guard labs, Derek. Welcome back to the program. >>Likewise, we've talked a lot this year. And of course, when I saw that there are, uh, you guys have predictions from 40 guard labs, global threat intelligence and research team about the cyber threat landscape for 2022. I thought it was going to be a lot to talk about with Derek here. So let's go ahead and dig. Right in. First of all, one of the things that caught my attention was the title of the press release about the predictions that was just revealed. The press release says 40 guard labs, predict cyber attacks aimed at everything from crypto wallets to satellite internet, nothing. There is no surface that is safe anymore. Talk to me about some of the key challenges that organizations in every industry are facing. >>Yeah, absolutely. So this is a, as you said, you, you had the keyword there surface, right? That, and that attack surface is, is open for attack. That's the attack surface that we talk about it is literally be pushed out from the edge to space, like a lot of these places that had no connection before, particularly in OT environments off grid, we're talking about, uh, you know, um, uh, critical infrastructure, oil and gas, as an example, there's a lot of these remote units that were living out there that relied on field engineers to go in and, uh, you know, plug into them. They were air gapped, those such low. Those are the things that are going to be accessible by Elio's low earth orbit satellites. And there are 4,000 of those out there right now. There's going to be over 30,000. We're talking Starlink, we're talking at least four or five other competitors entering this space, no pun intended. And, um, and that's a big deal because that it's a gateway. It opens the door for cyber criminals to be able to have accessibility to these networks. And so security has to come, you know, from, uh, friends of mine there, right. >>It absolutely does. We've got this fragmented perimeter tools that are siloed, the expand and very expanded attack surface, as you just mentioned, but some of the other targets, the 5g enabled edge, the core network, of course, the home environment where many of us still are. >>Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that home environment like the edge, it is a, uh, it's, it's the smart edge, right? So we have things called edge access Trojans. These are Trojans that will actually impact and infect edge devices. And if you think about these edge devices, we're talking things that have machine learning and, and auto automation built into them a lot of privilege because they're actually processing commands and acting on those commands in a lot of cases, right? Everything from smart office, smart home option, even until the OT environment that we're talking about. And that is a juicy target for attackers, right? Because these devices naturally have more privileged. They have APIs and connectivity to a lot of these things where they could definitely do some serious damage and be used as these pivot within the network from the edge. Right. And that's, that's a key point there. >>Let's talk about the digital wallet that we all walk around with. You know, we think out so easy, we can do quick, simple transactions with apple wallet, Google smart tab, Venmo, what have you, but that's another growing source of that, where we need to be concerned, right? >>Yeah. So I, I I've, I've worn my cyber security hat for over 20 years and 10 years ago, even we were talking all about online banking Trojans. That was a big threat, right? Because a lot of financial institutions, they hadn't late ruled out things like multifactor authentication. It was fairly easy to get someone's bank credentials go in siphoned fans out of an account. That's a lot harder nowadays. And so cyber criminals are shifting tactics to go after the low hanging fruit, which are these digital wallets and often cryptocurrency, right? We've actually seen this already in 40 guard labs. Some of this is already starting to happen right now. I expect this to happen a lot more in 20, 22 and beyond. And it's because, you know, these wallets are, um, hold a lot of whole lot of value right now, right. With the crypto. And they can be transferred easily without having to do a, like a, you know, EFT is a Meijer transfers and all those sorts of things that includes actually a lot of paperwork from the financial institutions. And, you know, we saw something where they were actually hijacking these wallets, right. Just intercepting a copy and paste command because it takes, you know, it's a 54 character address people aren't typing that in all the time. So when they're sending or receiving funds, they're asking what we've actually seen in malware today is they're taking that, intercepting it and replacing it with the attackers. Well, it's simple as that bypassing all the, you know, authentication measures and so forth. >>And is that happening for the rest of us that don't have a crypto wallet. So is that happening for folks with apple wallets? And is that a growing threat concern that people need to be? It is >>Absolutely. Yeah. So crypto wallets is, is the majority of overseeing, but yeah, no, no digital wallet is it's unpatched here. Absolutely. These are all valid targets and we are starting to see activity in. I am, >>I'm sure going after those stored credentials, that's probably low-hanging fruit for the attackers. Another thing that was interesting that the 2022 predictions threat landscape, uh, highlighted was the e-sports industry and the vulnerabilities there. Talk to me about that. That was something that I found surprising. I didn't realize it was a billion dollar revenue, a year industry, a lot of money, >>A lot of money, a lot of money. And these are our full-blown platforms that have been developed. This is a business, this isn't, you know, again, going back to what we've seen and we still do see the online gaming itself. We've seen Trojans written for that. And oftentimes it's just trying to get into, and user's gaming account so that they can steal virtual equipment and current, you know, there there's virtual currencies as well. So there was some monetization happening, but not on a grand scale. This is about a shift attackers going after a business, just like any organization, big business, right. To be able to hold that hostage effectively in terms of DDoSs threats, in terms of vulnerabilities, in terms of also, you know, crippling these systems with ransomware, like we've already seen starting to hit OT, this is just another big target. Right. Um, and if you think about it, these are live platforms that rely on low latency. So very quick connections, anything that interrupts that think about the Olympics, right on sports environment, it's a big deal to them. And there's a lot of revenue that could be lost in cybercriminals fully realizes. And this is why, you know, we're predicting that e-sports is going to be a, um, a big target for them moving forward. >>Got it. And tell, let's talk about what's going on with brands. So when you and I spoke a few months ago, I think it was ransomware was up nearly 11 X in the first half of a calendar year, 2021. What are you seeing from an evolution perspective, uh, in the actual ransomware, um, actions themselves as well as what the, what the cyber criminals are evolving to. >>Yeah. So to where it's aggressive, destructive, not good words, right. But, but this is what we're seeing with ransomware. Now, again, they're not just going after data as the currency, we're seeing, um, destructive capabilities put into ransomware, including wiper malware. So this used to be just in the realm of, uh, APTT nation state attacks. We saw that with should moon. We saw that with dark soil back in 2013, so destructive threats, but in the world of apt and nation state, now we're seeing this in cyber crime. We're seeing it with ransomware and this, I expect to be a full-blown tactic for cyber criminals simply because they have the, the threat, right. They've already leveraged a lot of extortion and double extortion schemes. We've talked about that. Now they're going to be onboarding this as a new threat, basically planting these time bombs. He's ticking time bombs, holding systems for, for, for ransom saying, and probably crippling a couple of, to show that they mean business and saying, unless you pay us within a day or two, we're going to take all of these systems offline. We're not just going to take them offline. We're going to destroy them, right. That's a big incentive for people to, to, to pay up. So they're really playing on that fear element. That's what I mean about aggressive, right? They're going to be really shifting tactics, >>Aggressive and destructive, or two things you don't want in a cybersecurity environment or to be called by your employer. Just wanted to point that out. Talk to me about wiper malware. Is this new emerging, or is this something that's seeing a resurgence because this came up at the Olympics in the summer, right? >>Absolutely. So a resurgence in, in a sort of different way. Right. So, as I said, we have seen it before, but it's been not too prevalent. It's been very, uh, it's, it's been a niche area for them, right. It's specifically for these very highly targeted attack. So yes, the Olympics, in fact, two times at the Olympics in Tokyo, but also in the last summer Olympics as well. We also saw it with, as I mentioned in South Korea at dark school in 2013, we saw it an OT environment with the moon as an example, but we're talking handfuls here. Uh, unfortunately we have blogged about three of these in the last month to month and a half. Right. And that, and you know, this is starting to be married with ransomware, which is particularly a very dangerous cause it's not just my wiper malware, but couple that with the ransom tactics. >>And that's what we're starting to see is this new, this resurgent. Yes. But a completely new form that's taking place. Uh, even to the point I think in the future that it could, it could severely a great, now what we're seeing is it's not too critical in a sense that it's not completely destroying the system. You can recover the system still we're talking to master boot records, those sorts of things, but in the future, I think they're going to be going after the formal firmware themselves, essentially turning some of these devices into paperweights and that's going to be a very big problem. >>Wow. That's a very scary thought that getting to the firmware and turning those devices into paperweights. One of the things also that the report talked about that that was really interesting. Was that more attacks against the supply chain and Linux, particularly talk to us about that. What did you find there? What does it mean? What's the threat for organizations? >>Yeah. So we're seeing a diversification in terms of the platforms that cyber criminals are going after. Again, it's that attack surface, um, lower hanging fruit in a sense, uh, because they've, you know, for a fully patched versions of windows, 10 windows 11, it's harder, right. For cyber criminals than it was five or 10 years ago to get into those systems. If we look at the, uh, just the prevalence, the amount of devices that are out there in IOT and OT environments, these are running on Linux, a lot of different flavors and forms of Linux, therefore this different security holes that come up with that. And that's, that's a big patch management issue as an example too. And so this is what we, you know, we've already seen it with them or I bought net and this was in our threat landscape report, or I was the number one threat that we saw. And that's a Linux-based bot net. Now, uh, Microsoft has rolled out something called WSL, which is a windows subsystem for Linux and windows 10 and windows 11, meaning that windows supports Linux now. So that all the code that's being written for botnets, for malware, all that stuff is able to run on, on new windows platforms effectively. So this is how they're trying to expand their, uh, attack surface. And, um, that ultimately gets into the supply chain because again, a lot of these devices in manufacturing and operational technology environments rely quite heavily actually on Linux. >>Well, and with all the supply chain issues that we've been facing during the pandemic, how can organizations protect themselves against this? >>Yeah. So this, this is a big thing, right? And we talked about also the weaponization of artificial intelligence, automation and all of these, there's a lot going on as you know, right from the threats a lot to get visibility on a lot, to be able to act quickly on that's a big key metric. There is how quick you can detect these and respond to them for that. You need good threat intelligence, of course, but you also truly need to enable, uh, uh, automation, things like SD wan, a mesh architecture as well, or having a security fabric that can actually integrate devices that talk to each other and can detect these threats and respond to them quickly. That's a very important piece because if you don't stop these attacks well, they're in that movement through the attack chain. So the kill chain concept we talk about, um, the risk is very high nowadays where, you know, everything we just talked about from a ransomware and destructive capabilities. So having those approaches is very important. Also having, um, you know, education and a workforce trained up is, is equally as important to, to be, you know, um, uh, to, to be aware of these threats. >>I'm glad you brought up that education piece and the training, and that's something that 49 is very dedicated to doing, but also brings up the cybersecurity skills gap. I know when I talked with Kenzie, uh, just a couple months ago at the, um, PGA tournament, it was talking about, you know, big investments in what 40 guard, 40, 40 net is doing to help reduce that gap. But the gap is still there. How do I teach teams not get overloaded with the expanding service? It seems like the surface, the surface has just, there is no limit anymore. So how does, how does it teams that are lean and small help themselves in the fact that the threat is landscape is, is expanding. The criminals are getting smarter or using AI intelligent automation, what our it teams do >>Like fire with fire. You got to use two of the same tools that they're using on their side, and you need to be able to use in your toolkit. We're talking about a security operation center perspective to have tools like, again, this comes to the threat intelligence to get visibility on these things. We're talking Simmons, sor uh, we have, you know, 40 AI out now, uh, deception products, all these sorts of things. These are all tools that need that, that, uh, can help, um, those people. So you don't have to have a, you know, uh, hire 40 or 50 people in your sock, right? It's more about how you can work together with the tools and technology to get, have escalation paths to do more people, process procedure, as we talk about to be able to educate and train on those, to be able to have incident response planning. >>So what do you do like, because inevitably you're going to be targeted, probably interacts where attack, what do you do? Um, playing out those scenarios, doing breach and attack simulation, all of those things that comes down to the skills gaps. So it's a lot about that education and awareness, not having to do that. The stuff that can be handled by automation and AI and, and training is you're absolutely right. We've dedicated a lot with our NSC program at 49. We also have our 40 net security academy. Uh, you know, we're integrating with those secondary so we can have the skillsets ready, uh, for, for new graduates. As an example, there's a lot of progress being made towards that. We've even created a new powered by 40 guard labs. There is a 40 guard labs play in our NSC seven as an example, it's, uh, you know, for, um, uh, threat hunting and offensive security as an example, understanding really how attackers are launching their, their campaigns and, um, all those things come together. But that's the good news actually, is that we've come a long way. We actually did our first machine learning and AI models over 10 years ago, Lisa, this isn't something new to us. So the technology has gone a long way. It's just a matter of how we can collaborate and obviously integrate with that for the, on the skills gap. >>And one more question on the actual threat landscape, were there any industries that came up in particular, as we talked about e-sports we talked about OT and any industries that came up in particular as, as really big hotspots that companies and organizations really need to be aware of. >>Yeah. So also, uh, this is part of OT about ICS critical infrastructure. That's a big one. Uh, absolutely there we're seeing, uh, also cyber-criminals offering more crime services now on dark web. So CAS, which is crime as a service, because it used to be a, again, a very specialized area that maybe only a handful of organized criminal organizations could actually, um, you know, launch attacks and, and impact to those targets where they're going after those targets. Now they're offering services right on to other coming cyber criminals, to be able to try to monetize that as well. Again, we're seeing this, we actually call it advanced persistent cybercrime APC instead of an apt, because they're trying to take cyber crime to these targets like ICS, critical infrastructure, um, healthcare as well is another one, again, usually in the realm of APMT, but now being targeted more by cybercriminals in ransomware, >>I've heard of ransomware as a service, is that a subcategory of crime as a service? >>Absolutely. Yeah. It is phishing as a service ransomware as, and service DDoSs as a service, but not as, as many of these subcategories, but a ransomware as a service. That's a, another big problem as well, because this is an affiliate model, right. Where they hire partners and pay them commission, uh, if they actually get payments of ransom, right? So they have literally a middle layer in this network that they're pushing out to scale their attacks, >>You know, and I think that's the last time we talked about ransomware, we talked about it's a matter of, and I talk to customers all the time who say, yes, it's a matter of when, not, if, is, is this the same sentiment? And you think for crime as a service in general, the attacks on e-sports on home networks, on, uh, internet satellites in space, is this just a matter of when, not if across the board? >>Well, yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, but the good news is it doesn't have to be a, you know, when it happens, it doesn't have to be a catastrophic situation. Again, that's the whole point about preparedness and planning and all the things I talked about, the filling the skills gap in education and having the proper, proper tools in place that will mitigate that risk. Right. And that's, and that's perfectly acceptable. And that's the way we should handle this from the industry, because we process we've talked about this, people are over a hundred billion threats a day in 40 guard labs. The volume is just going to continue to grow. It's very noisy out there. And there's a lot of automated threats, a lot of attempts knocking on organizations, doors, and networks, and, you know, um, phishing emails being sent out and all that. So it's something that we just need to be prepared for just like you do for a natural disaster planning and all these sorts of other things in the physical world. >>That's a good point. It doesn't have to be aggressive and destructive, but last question for you, how can, how is 4d guard helping companies in every industry get aggressive and disruptive against the threats? >>Yeah. Great, great, great question. So this is something I'm very passionate about, uh, as you know, uh, where, you know, we, we don't stop just with customer protection. Of course, that is as a security vendor, that's our, our primary and foremost objective is to protect and mitigate risk to the customers. That's how we're doing. You know, this is why we have 24 7, 365 operations at 40 guy labs. Then we're helping to find the latest and greatest on threat intelligence and hunting, but we don't stop there. We're actually working in the industry. Um, so I mentioned this before the cyber threat Alliance to, to collaborate and share intelligence on threats all the way down to disrupt cybercrime. This is what big target of ours is, how we can work together to disrupt cyber crime. Because unfortunately they've made a lot of money, a lot of profits, and we need to reduce that. We need to send a message back and fight that aggressiveness and we're we're on it, right? So we're working with Interpol or project gateway with the world economic forum, the partnership against cyber crime. It's a lot of initiatives with other, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, the who's who of cyber security in the industry to work together and tackle this collaboratively. Um, the good news is there's been some steps of success to that. There's a lot more, we're doing the scale of the efforts. >>Excellent. Well, Derek as always great and very informative conversation with you. I always look forward to these seeing what's going on with the threat landscape, the challenges, the increasing challenges, but also the good news, the opportunities in it, and what 40 guard is doing 40 left 40 net, excuse me, I can't speak today to help customers address that. And we always appreciate your insights and your time we look forward to talking to you and unveiling the next predictions in 2022. >>All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Lisa. >>My pleasure for Derek manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation with 40 net. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Jeff correctly or coming to you from Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen with about thirty, five hundred or so folks here. Big community, big open source spirit. We're very pleased to welcome from the keynote stage. Jenny Chang, The pee at PayPal. Jennie. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, Lee. >> So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. We'Ll get into a lot of the specifics, but just looking at Magenta Oh, Adobe, This evolution of e commerce that's really driven by consumers. We want to have everything right on her phone as easily as possible. We went out lightning fast. Talk to us. About From what? You seen this evolution of e commerce and where we are today. >> Yeah, It's been a fascinating journey. Toe watch us move from point no sale, mood from brick and mortar Teo online and engaged. And I think as part of that, you know, you think about the amount of time you spend on your mobile phone. It's not surprising that most sites. Fifty percent of the visitors on that site are on their mobile devices, and they're staying longer. Maybe you're killing time, right? Waiting for your husband to finish something or your child to come out of class. And so we naturally tend to get on our mobile phones, and we look for things to do so that engagement on the mobile phone it becomes absolutely critical and what's been fascinating As part of the conference, we've been sharing some early results about mobile optimization. And what we're finding is, even though engagement is going up from a mobile phone, revenue is not there. >> The gap. >> Yeah, there's a big, big gaffe, and you look at that. And you think, Well, I need to figure out how to actually convert some of these people coming to my website. So we've been partnering with a lot of the Sai community here, really interest in trying to understand best practices, and it's been a fun process for almost the last year. Things that you would think would help conversion don't necessarily help. And then the very, interestingly enough, other things that you may have said well, that seems unnecessary or busy on my mobile phone are actually improving conversion. So we've been really just sharing our early results in really encouraging everyone to participate. It's free, and we want to do is really come up with best practices and really help everyone essentially convert more and get more revenue. >> There's two things that strike me. It is you say that one is just the behaviour of a mobile phone in interaction is so different. You said. It's often when you're waiting, waiting in the grocery store line, you're waiting to pick up your kid your weight. So it is a much more kind of frequent fast in and out which which we keep hearing right. You need to connect with people over time in both the ways. But the other thing, when you say the conversion is actually not as high as you would expect. But at the same time we're hearing now that the content is so much so important and having things that aren't directly commerce to drive your engagement with that client in the way of content and forums and other things. I wonder if maybe that's why the conversion is there. You're getting him there, which is great they're hanging out longer, which I'm sure is a terrific metric. So maybe they're not converting because they're engaging with that other content arm or engaging with the brand. A >> combination of a couple things and one of them tear point is, you know, for better, Worse. You're easily interrupted when you're on your mobile phone to >> just trip when >> we have you, how can we quickly get to you? Pass that point of check out right? And I think part of that is, as you know, it's if you're like me, I will. Fat finger. You know, I have a difficult time typing on my mobile device. So wanted things we talk a lot about is removing that friction. So how do you make it really easy? See right. So if you're able to store your credentials, if you're able to make it simple to check out right, that's ultimately the goal for a lot of our merchants here, which is when we've got you. We've got to capitalize on your attention right at that moment in time and make it super easy for you to convert one of things that's been interesting about the optimized kind of mobile optimization results we've seen is that what we're finding is that a lot of people, what they're looking for at that point of engagement is coupon codes and you get distracted. You'LL think Well, I'm going to buy that. But maybe I need to go look for a coupon. >> Go back to my email me >> on And so you know So there are a lot of interesting ideas that were having as a community to share. How can we do that? How can we make sure? Maybe you get your coupon code, but you don't click off and disappear and maybe forget to come back on. I notorious for doing that. I'm also notorious for putting something in my shopping cart getting distracted and walking away. And so I think a lot of it is looking at these various ways to make sure you are back and engaged. And I think this is a big part of where the journey will go with the Palmers going forward. I think we'LL be looking at now that we've got your eyeballs. Now that we've got your time, how do we convince you this is going from a browse mode? Teo actual shop mode, >> right, creating more shop, a ble moments as magenta is marketing, material says. But also to your point about simplicity, probably for even any any generation is its basic marketing. Don't deliver a great piece of content and have a hyperlink in the first sentence that's going to take your audience somewhere else. Keep me in the experience. Use enough money. What do you say? Enough of the data to where it's going from. Creepy Teo >> Magic, Right, Right, right, right. If it works, it should be magic, right? But I already bought the tent. Now I need it. I need a sleeping bag. Don't keeps his enemy tent ads, right? >> Right. But that simplicity is sort of in AP in experience. Consistency is really key. Otherwise, your point and your point. We're doing this often while we're doing something else. There's a lot of multitasking going on. Make it easier, but also use the data with these systems that you're integrated with to know exactly. I bought it sent. I don't need one, but I might need that these other things >> right, right. And I think that's really where things are moving with artificial intelligence and machine learning We're trying to understand us a shopper and be able to predict right What else? You know, Bond from the tents. Now, maybe it's time to get a low. You know, uh, camper, maybe that's your next step up, right? Maybe you move into an RV. Who knows? Right. So I think there are evolution's to that buying experience >> with other evolution. Which people is that the very beginning was the alternative payment methods, right? Not not just your basic credit card or cash. And I don't know. It's a lot of people know that you guys have venmo, which if you have kids, you know we don't have young kids. You don't know what Venmo is. I wonder if you've got a take on, you know, as these alternative methods by come up and then we're also surrounded with alternative financing types of platforms where they're not using traditional FICO scores. They're not using kind of a traditional apply get approved process. It's really dynamic on the financing side as well. >> Yeah, onto your point. So PayPal. One of our best kept secrets I like to say is that we have both Braintree and Venmo is part of our overall services and then even broader than that. What we've done is packaged up the ability to really think about alternative pay methods based on what region you're on as well, because depending where you are outside the U. S. You might actually use a completely different payment method. And I think for us in the U. S. Were not as familiar with some of these other payment options. And what it does is it really allows for a lot more cross border trade as well for our merchants as they would look and offer kind of what is most relevant again. Get to you to go from brows mode to actually check out mode and to get to that actual conversion piece. So that's one of them. And then I would say, just generally on the credit comment, we actually credit at PayPal as well. And what we're always looking at is what our other ways we can help people finance and really kind of worked through the evolution of payments. I think some of the statistics that you've probably heard related to savings in the US, especially it's a bit staggering that we have, on average, uh, majority people have less than four hundred dollars in savings there, one paycheck away. And the reality is, it's tough. That's a really, really tough. And so I think, to be able tio, have a source of credit where you could bridge that gap and, to your point, not have to go through the entire credit processes. Sara Lee I think having those options are always good. >> Talk to us about what you guys are doing with Walmart. He showed that you came here this morning that it was very interesting from a collaboration. A partnership standpoint. >> I'm very passionate about this because pay panelists overall has a mission of democratizing financial services, and I think we're very fortunate being in high tech and being in the situation. We are where we're able, Tio not be intimidated necessarily by all this new technology on all the different options out there. So the partnership with Walmart was at the end of last year, and it really was looking at How do we get people access to their papal dollars easier, Faster and we continuously see this divide between the digital on the physical realms of accessing money. And so we opened up an option partnering with WalMart for us, which is it's really easy to rip a pal out. You bring up a unique bar code, you can go into a Wal Mart store and essentially like a debit card. It debits it out of your PayPal account and the Wal Mart cashier hand. You're the catch, which is super convenient again and an easy way to get to your money if you need something immediately. So I'm really excited. Proud of that, >> he said. You launch that last year. Some of the data, the market data that demonstrated that this was a good direction, her paper out to go in to be able to open up. This is a CZ, the ability to give people more access to their dollars, whether they're online or in physical locations. >> Yeah, I think it's someone of those overall statistics. We look at a lot because we're really looking at continuously bridging our open two sided network. We've got this great merchant face twenty one million merchants and then we're at almost round track to be almost three hundred million consumers, and we can we look at the consumer side and you think about Venmo you think about papal? We really started as a peer to peer right now, right? Oh, I owe you twenty bucks for dinner last night. Let me pay, pal. You that money, let me venmo you that money. And at some point, the question becomes will. Then how do I easily access my money? How do I make sure that I have access to it again? Not just digitally, but physically. And I think when we're looking at those realms, we're looking at more options to give people that ability, that if they need to get to that cash quickly, that can get to it quickly. They don't need to worry about getting to a bank. Um, you know, I think the reality is it's easier to get to a lot of Wal Mart stores in the U. S. Then it is necessarily to every bank out there. And so I think we're constantly looking at where can partnerships really add value to our overall customer base? And as I mentioned this morning's keynote, I love when partners really can work together and it becomes truly, you know, a little bit of a trite saying. But no one plus one is greater than two scenario, and I think when you can do that, it adds so much value to both sides of the equation. That's was really exciting for me. That's why I love partners, >> but also giving cut consumer's choice. Where you think this morning in your keynote, you showed this cute picture daughter approved your girl's in that ten years ago and then today, and, you know, ten years ago you couldn't just go in on happened order groceries. Now you were saying, when you know your mom would have to get multiple stores to get what you want, and now we can get it so easily. But there's also this sort of interesting dynamic where people still want to have that physical interaction, depending on the type of product or service. So being able to give customers that choice of being able to transact it through the app online or being able to access their money, for example, your Walmart. I mean, oftentimes, if I'm running out running errands and I don't have my wallet, and I know all right, I know the stories I can use bright certain payment methods from my phone, and that's great because I had that choice. And that's something that seems like PayPal is working to facilitators meeting consumer demand. Where it is. >> Yeah, I think that's the reality of what? Where we live right now, which is our customers want us there at that point of engagement. So don't make me necessarily. Come, Teo, you I would like you to come to me and you know, for better. Worse. It is a little bit of the overall experience that they're looking for, which is to say, I've got my favorite places to either shop or engage on my mobile device. So make it easy for me. And I think that's ultimately what we're kind of looking for. I know is a working parent. I'm always looking for convenience than I've just said. I'm gonna write a book on convenient parenting like that gets work for me. >> That was part of that. We'd be a bestseller. I think parents of humans or canine think we could all use any inspect a >> furry child as well. So yes, >> I'm curious what we're going to see in the next year, too. With that conversion of actually enabling an organization to not just have a great mobile experience, whether it's with like progressive Web maps that they were talking about this morning. But it's one thing to have a great mobile experience. It's a whole other thing to convert that to revenue. So curious to see with partnerships of papal, for example, with Beno how merchants of any sides are actually able to start increasing conversion from visitor to revenue. >> And I mentioned it as part of what we're doing with what we're calling smart payment buttons. And I think that's smart. Payment button concept is really again focused on giving you options to check out with whatever is easier for you but also looking to say, Let's make it easy. So how do you do that without having to type everything again? Because if you're an avid online shopper like I'm not, it's It becomes tiresome to feel like you have to sign up at every website, or you have to enter all your shipping information again your payment information. And so I think it's really looking at How do we give you that digital wallet access so that you have the ability to make it easy? Yes, and I think that's ultimately What we're kind of all looking for is how do you make it convenient? Easy for me to do what I want to do and do what I have to do. >> Spend more of my money. Thank you so much for joining me on the Cuban. Talking about what you guys are doing. A papal with your partners with Gento, etcetera. It's very interesting. And we look forward to seeing great things to come and not focus by long Communion. Parenting? Yes. Watch out like an advance. Copy you? Yeah. Thank you. Pleasure. Okay. For Jeff Rick, I'm least Martin live. The Cube is alive. Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(orchestral string music) >> Welcome to this special Cube Conversation here in our Palo Alto studios, the Cube office here. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconAngle Media, and also the co-host of the Cube. Our next guest is Jeremy Almond who is the CEO of PayStand, a hot startup doing some really new things in and around Blockchain, decentralized, and really targeting the B to B space on a really compelling and an interesting topic that a lot of people are interested in. Jeremy, welcome to this Cube Conversation. >> Awesome, thank you John. >> John: Hey, so tell me a little bit about the company and set the table for us...Paystand, what you guys are doing, why you were founded, and what's the disruptive enabler you guys are taking? What's the angle of your business? >> Jeremy: Yeah, sure...so Paystand, like you mentioned, is a B to B software platform specifically focused on payment. So you can imagine what PayPal or Venmo does from the consumer level. We do for complicated commercial transactions between accounts receivable and accounts payable departments that normally would be paying with paper checks in a manual process. >> John: So basically, accounting, ledger, I'm kind of guessing...nice fit for Blockchain... >> Correct, yeah, yeah. So what we do is we apply Blockchain technology to help a company speed up their time-to-cash, automate their business process, and dramatically lower their transaction costs. >> I'll get your thoughts on this...I interviewed Don Tapscott at an event and we were riffing on this notion of the nature of the firm, right? People would come to an office, you'd have accounting, all these things that you'd have to put in place of systems. Now with this decentralized world we're living in, internet, and with Blockchain in particular, and a crypto-currency market that's pretty frothy but, you know, you look at Blockchain and separate those two for a minute, you really can look at ways to change how work is organized. How do you guys view that? I mean, it's obviously a new, big wave coming. Then you got businesses who are just trying to operate and make money, right? Keep the lights on, but they almost have to start rethinking about the future. So, what is this block wave...Blockchain wave coming? How do you talk about that? Is it that disruptive? I mean, certainly centralized databases aren't going away anytime soon, but it's coming. What's your thoughts in reaction to that? >> It's coming, you know...I think it's... It will affect the enterprise which is where we spend our time and space, in a lot of ways like Cloud did, right? So I've spent probably 15 years doing un-sexy B to B tech, in some way, shape, or form. And what we've seen is digital transformation in the enterprise has happened in a few key areas. CRM is now in the Cloud, right? You have companies like SalesForce that have become significant. ERP is now in the Cloud, your financial software is now automated, right? Kind of ironically, the last mile piece, that part that lubricates the business, the core of the business, the money-movement piece, is actually still really, really manual. So, you have humans that sit around and they take an invoice and then a paper check and then they move it, and that process is very, very ineffecient. And so, having a more automatic, smart financial system can improve the business's life in really significant ways. >> Also, you know, one of the things we've been commenting on and opining here on the Cube is... I made a statement a couple weeks ago, "Oh, MarTech"...you know, marketing technology wave, all those logos on those landscape slides, "didn't really pan out 'cause the Cloud kind of changes that." I mean, it's panning out, but not the way people thought. FinTech...financial tech...is also certainly important. Banks, subsidy trading, you see that. What is the inhibitor for these new trends? Because you mentioned they're moving paper around. I mean, it's money, they probably don't want to mess with an operational system that's core to their business. Is it fear? Is it tech? Both? What's your view on why it's taking so long? Or is it moving along at a speed you think it's going to... Be adopted? >> Jeremy: Yeah, it's actually kind of a unique point in time right now. I think on one hand, financial services in general, part of their job is to manage risk, right? And so they're going to be a lagging, in some ways, industry. And so, digital transformation, right? The internet has opened up and democratized media. It's opened up so many other areas. Blockchain now is the entry point for digital transformation of financial services, and so the time is probably right, right now. We've been in the space...we started the company in 2014. And, you know, I've seen over the last three years, hearing banks, other large institutions, large enterprises, go from skepticism to curiosity. >> John: What's the technology stack look like? Obviously four years is, like, decades in the Blockchain world, and obviously, people are running as fast as they can. It's kind of a moving train at many levels. Business model side as well as a tech stack. And this is really the opportunity. A lot of these systems... I mean, some of the e-commerce systems are 20-year-old tech stacks, some are even older. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Just going back four years, since you were founded... What's the big moving glacier, if you will, of change and how are you guys managing that? How should people think about managing the risk of the tech stack? >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think...you know... On the Blockchain-specific side... in the early days, a lot of it was about currency, and actual payment, right? I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity for Blockchain, particularly in the enterprise, to actually dramatically improve their operations side, right? Ethereum, private Blockchains... actually have the ability to not just decentralize how money movement or networks operate, but how an internal system operates. I'll give you an example...we used the Blockchain to... A private Blockchain to actually control approval workflow. So when a payment goes out, oftentimes you need your accounts payable person to send a payment out, but the controller or the treasury or someone else has to sign off on it, right? So that signature, you need it to be valid, trusted, the identity around it, right? And you want an audit record. And so Blockchain's a really, really good use case for something like that. That's not peer-play payments, it's not peer-play settlement. It doesn't require, you know, a million people to get on. It just can operate in the business in a really critical function, in a better way than the current technology does. >> John: It's interesting, I love these new technology opportunities 'cause... There's always going to be a tipping point and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, "Hey if I was asked to build a better "phone in 2005, I would have built an excellent... "better Blackberry." But he...then he built the iPhone, so he thought differently. No one was really asking for the iPhone. The question I get a lot from skeptics in Blockchain is, "No one's really asking for Blockchain." So, again, this is kind of like...you could always say, "I'm building a better centralized database system "in a distributed computing environment." Okay, we've done that. >> Yeah. >> Are people asking for Blockchain, or are they just asking for it in a different way? What's your thoughts to that? >> Yeah, I would say that there's... There's a big picture question of, "Are people asking for it." And I'd say society's actually asking for it. Part of my personal story is, you know, my family, blue collar family, they... My mother's side immigrated here, her generation. My brick-layer father, they spent their entire lives getting their first home. And you know, 800 square foot home, that's nothing special, but it was their American dream. In 2008, in the financial crisis, they lost the house. And so I think, you know, society said, "Financial services and core parts of our economy "actually could...we could do better, right?" And I think the magic thing about technology is we get to imagine the world not as it is but as it ought to be. So one, I think society is actually asking for... Can the core parts of our economy actually do better? Can we dream up something better? And I think that's the purest part of what the folks in the Blockchain movement are trying to do. That's, you know, at a very high level. And then I think, practically, right, for businesses like we operate day in and day out...you know... If there's technology that allows them to be able to operate their business more efficiently, drop their costs and grow faster, you know... How would that work, right? It's in some ways like Cloud. How does Cloud work? You know, I think... now we're really getting into the deep mess of it, but you know, Cloud was transformative to the business, right? VOIP was transformative to some businesses. Inbound marketing was transformative to some businesses. Blockchain is the same kind of concept. >> I mean, and Cloud, too...there was a lot of naysayers. I remember I used the first EC2 instances of Amazon when it came out, being an entrepreneur, I'm like, "I don't have to provision servers? "This is amazing, I can put my credit card down "and pay a few bucks..." And then even still, up until, I would say, even three or four years ago they were dismissed as relevant. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And again, the rest is history, look what they've done. So there's always going to be those naysayers. But to the point about Cloud and Blockchains, and even crypto, this is a wave, and we've, you know... We're very bullish on this movement because we see the wave coming way out there and it's huge. This is probably bigger than the other waves combined, in our opinion. So you mentioned societal change. This is a big deal. I mean, you're seeing regulations right now in GDPR in Europe, kind of trying to govern an old database market that's...it's a mess, database wise. But it makes sense from a society standpoint. People want to pull their data out. This is a trend. You got societal forces, and then technical legacy. I mean, this could be an opportunity for Blockchain to say, "Hey, optimize for the new wave." Don't try to retrofit, say, an old wave. What's your thoughts? >> Jeremy: Correct, yeah, I mean I think there's a... ...a number of areas... Even in the data cyber society. Take an Enron scandal, right? That happened a decade plus ago. Out of that came regulation called Sarbanes-Oxley, right? And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept, right, is to ensure that companies publicly account for their records in a proper way, right? If there's an audit trail, that they don't sort of take their financial systems and misrepresent them, right? Blockchain, because it's a source of truth that's immutable, meaning it can't be changed, is a great way, right, to have more efficiency in that process. Today there's a whole industry that's popped up just for Sarbanes-Oxley, just to regulate the financial system, just to ensure that the books actually say what they're supposed to say, right? That's kind of the definition of what a smart contract can and should do. >> John: This is really an opportunity for entrepreneurs, if you think about it. I mean, a lot of alpha entrepreneurs are really licking their chops on Blockchain because they can see how it could disrupt industries. And I showed you some of the things we're working on, and what we're thinking about for SiliconAngle about media and data. But it brings up things that we obviously see every day in the press: the election, weaponizing content for bad things. Facebook's having a challenge right now on how they optimize their data for their own self-service reasons. This is a problem, this is a revolution. People are kind of tired, so...what's your view of the role of data to the human? I mean, obviously, you know, the cliche: "Oh, the users are in charge, "they should own their own data." Okay I got that. But how...how do you see that vision playing out? I mean not just from a Facebook which is a social network example, but how does data impact a user going forward in your vision? Because they could really change from the outside in. >> Yeah, I mean I think...part of what's critical with data is two things: one, identity really matters, right? How do you manage identity? And so I think there's a number of really fascinating Blockchain companies that are specifically focused on the identity question, right? And that's...that's true around the social media side, it's true around...how do I actually manage where I move... Identity around? So I think that's one side that's really, really critical to solve. I don't know that we've got a crystal ball yet on what it will ultimately look like. But the Blockchain model for identity allows us to... rethink the fabrics of what privacy is, what permission looks like, and what trust looks like with people I want to engage with and with people I don't want to engage with. It's interesting, you talk about the Blockchain culture being more societal and mission-driven. My word, but you're kind of implying that. I remember when the Cloud came out, it was... The network guys were in charge, and the app guys were like, have to feed off the network requirements. And then that sea-change flipped around. The app guys are in charge, data driving requirements for the network. Question for you is: Do you see a day, soon, where societal requirements will dictate technology? I mean, you're seeing... you're seeing that pattern kind of emerging now, it's kind of not yet been fully thought through in public commentary but, you know...we see these pressure points potentially impacting tech design. >> Jeremy: Yeah, yeah...I think there's actually a good tug-of-war or balance, right? So entrepreneurs naturally are going to run as fast as they can to see innovation hopefully with means of improving society, right? And then, you know, you have regulators and you have government agencies who are looking and saying, "Okay, you might be thinking about one myopic view "and we need to make sure "we're looking at the good of society." And so I think that tug-of-war you saw with the internet, right, where how much do we regulate the internet, right? And I think the balance was mostly healthy. And we're sort of seeing that through today with Blockchain as well, where...you know, things like ICOs have good and bad implications. The regulators have been watching it relatively closely. But they also haven't completely came down and clamped down on it, you know, even this week there's... There was a relative balance in the discussions that came out. >> John: The SEC's done a good job, they've... >> Correct. >> John: They whipped a few people in shape to send the signal, but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. >> Jeremy: That's correct, yeah. >> And ICOs...certainly there're some scams. What's the good sides of ICO? Obviously the scams are out there. What's the good side? The fundraising? Democratization? What's your take on the ICO? Initial coin offering opportunity. >> Yeah, you know, I think...in some ways, democratization has become such a buzzword it's lost its meaning, right? But if you think about what it really is, it's so powerful, because it's this concept, right, that we distribute power and control to the hands of many. And so, you know, I think there are a lot of public good technologies that actually can use that concept, right? The internet is a public good. You could argue Wikipedia is a public good, right? And so, utility-type tokens actually are valuable because they can have a dual nature to them. I think the other thing that I'm particularly interested in watching how ICOs evolve is...I think there's some danger in ICOs...coming in and... in the early stage market. Because early stage companies tend to be... They're so nascent that they need guidance, right? And I actually...I might be contradictory here to most people in the Blockchain space, but I actually think early stage investors have a lot of value in that space. And so, I am actually fascinated about what happens in later stage rounds and what do ICOs become there. So I think utility, and later stage rounds are actually two fascinating areas of ICOs. >> John: Sure, that's a great point. I would also say that the trend that we're seeing is... There's an early stage component that needs mentoring and needs some nurturing, I would agree with that. That's a classic VC, maybe some token economics in there, but again, different playbook. The tokenization of business is really interesting 'cause now you have token economics being applied to a preexisting, proven business, with a disruptive nature on the other side, is super interesting. So I have to ask you: Are we going to have a chief economic officer as a new role soon? Or, is that going to be...'cause remember, if you think about token economics, it's about opening up and changing the distribution of data and wealth, you can argue both are the same, but...how do you view that? Because that's a trend we're seeing. The tokenization of a business to disrupt an industry incumbent...set of incumbents. >> Correct, yeah, and I think it's a... it's really, really early days and what... You have really early stage companies that are thinking about tokenizing their business before they exist, right? And then you have other companies which are maybe past the innovation curve and they're trying to apply tokens to their business. >> A pivot of an existing business. >> Yeah, so we've seen these, right? Public companies that have added Blockchain to the name. I think the fascinating thing will become where... Fast-growing, real businesses, where there's a there there, they've crossed the chasm, go, "Okay how do we apply "tokenization to our company? "And how do we think about it, from both a... "commercial economic part of the business, "and then how do we think about it "from tokenizing the business?" And we haven't seen many cases yet, but I actually think that's one of the next waves we'll see. >> John: Great insight. I got to ask you on a personal level. You're doing some talking, obviously the founder of the company, CEO. What's going on? What do you talk about these days? What are you passionate about? I know you were talking to some folks at UC Santa Barbara. You mentioned going to teach down there. What are you talking about? What are you sharing publicly? what's on your mind these days? >> Yeah, I mean, I think...I'm personally deeply motivated every day by waking up and going, you know, "The financial service industry can go through a massive transformation, right? And I think there's a lot of really good companies that are doing that at the consumer level, and so, you know, I think our space...we have a unique place in time to be working at the commercial level. So the commercial level affects big parts of our economic infrastructure in ways that we don't think about. The Equifax breach was a pretty big deal to people, right? The financial crisis was a big deal to people. So, how do we imagine those kinds of industries, right? Supply chain, title, logistics, right? And how do we think about those industries, democratizing them with Blockchain? Those, to me, are the unsung heroes of what Blockchain will ultimately help transform society. >> John: It's interesting, you said you were kind of humble when you came on earlier. "I'm in boring areas of B to B..." But I got to say to your point about Cloud earlier, there's a calm before the storm, these boring areas that are, say, calm are really the grounds where you see disruption, and I think that's an area... Not just high-frequency trading, that's going to be, you know, always an issue, but in terms of real financial plumbing. >> Yeah. >> Perfect for a ledger, perfect for those things. Okay, take a plug for your company. How are people using you guys? What's the value proposition? What are some of the things that you guys are involved in? How does someone engage with you guys? Give the plug for PayStand. >> Yeah, so at PayStand, we tend to work with companies where there are high volumes of paper checks in the process. So if you have a $100,000 invoice that goes out, for example, with a company that you've been working at for a decade, and you have a contract that says it's a Net 60 contract, right? The challenge is, it's a paper check, you want to move it digitally, what do you move it digitally to? And the reality is the consumer payment companies that are focused on credit cards are not really an ideal solution for that because their business model is a percentage business model. There's nothing wrong with a percentage business model that charges a company two or three percent if I'm swiping for a five dollar cup of coffee, right? If it's a $100,000 payment that I owe someone that I know, and I have contract terms, I'm not going to pay the bank $3,000 to move ones and zeroes from this bank database to this bank database. So what we do with our network is we make that money movement fast, instant, automatic, verified, validated, right, with control, in a way where we can automate the process. >> It's so funny what jumped in my mind is punch cards to computers, tape to storage. This is interesting. So paper checks, probably big, I don't know what the numbers are, you might have them handy. People are doing paper checks, so you're building a system around paper checks, did I get that right? >> Yeah, so we digitize what would have been a paper check. Today over 50 percent of all commercial payments are still done in paper checks. So they're gone in our digital world, right? Like, you and I, we Venmo each other. But when a business goes to write a check, when they get an invoice, they send out a check. And so we digitize the whole process. The moment that the invoice is ready to go, to the moment it gets in the bank, it all becomes digital space. >> John: And the alternative is what, I got to go check when it was mailed, was it received, was it cashed, did it get put into the accounting system? And that's kind of... >> Jeremy: That's correct. >> That's the manual... >> Jeremy: That's the manual. So they spend...they'll spend a week tracking down the payment from the moment the controller says, "Okay to pay," to the time it sits in their bank account, that's humans, time, money. >> And an old, antiquated system that doesn't change because of...what? >> Jeremy: Well, it's legacy infrastructure in one way. But in another, you know, even the banking infrastructure, the...most of the banking infrastructure that are for commercial payments was designed in the 60s and 70s. And last time I checked, the 60s and 70s was before the internet of today. So they weren't really designed for digital realtime payments. And they weren't designed for commercial use cases like today. >> Is fraud a factor, or is that not a factor? Is that part of it, or...yes? >> Jeremy: Yeah and I think a key thing with what we do, enterprise payments, security is really, really important. We take it very, very seriously. And this is, again, one of the downsides to the legacy commercial infrastructure. When you have a check, right? You have this checking and routing number on it. Anybody takes that, in theory, that's all that identifies you and your company and your account. And so money can actually be moved and ran against in that case. With a network like ours, we can validate that you are who you say you are, you have the money in your account, it moved when it should, and you've actually authorized it. These are all things that we should know, but we just don't. >> John: And you take the data around it, you take that check, put it into the system. Okay so when does a company want...should be calling you. Is it like, "I'm overloaded with paper, "I want a new system, I'm doing a refresh." I mean, when do people call PayStand? What's the signals that would give your buyer some indicator of time to call PayStand? >> Yeah, so generally it's after...it's when they have high-volumes of checks and they're growing, and/or that they've basically taken their ERP, and they've done an ERP Cloud migration, right? And so now they've got their general ledger, and that financial system's not in a shoebox anymore, right? It's in a critical core ERP system. And so what they're finding is they've bought digital transformation for financial services and their accountant only sort of has half the solution. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. >> John: Okay, so I'm going to put my naysayer hat on and ask you the question: I love it, but what's this Blockchain thing? I'm an accounting guy, took one computer class, whatever, I get blockchained. How do you stay up to date, how do you ensure that I'm going to have a system that's going to be working? I know that Blockchain standards are changing. How do you guys mitigate that? How do you handle that question? >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think the critical thing for our customers, right, is... For us, our customers, money moves in dollars, right? It leaves their bank account, and goes into their supplier's bank account, the supplier's bank account goes into their customer's bank account, right? Their financial system does not change. We're actually very, very sensitive to that. We think about this very different than a consumer solution, which is...consumer solutions almost have a... A critical mass question. They need everybody to get into the system for it to work. For commercial, you don't actually want to change the business process of your partners, right? It's really important, they've been doing this...so... So we are very thoughtful about our software doesn't change business process, it doesn't require you to enter into some kind of new economy or a new currency. You simply do what you're always doing, with the systems you're already using, right? And we just digitize the process to make them faster, cheaper, and automated. >> Awesome. Talk about your goals for the year at PayStand. Where are you guys at, company-wise? Funding, goals, hiring, what's going on? Give a quick final word on the company. >> Jeremy: Yeah, I mean I think we...you know... We're blessed right now, I would say we're one of, if not the fastest B to B payment company... fastest-growing B to B payment company today. So, you know, I think we have a long way to go... I would call this inning two for us, right? We ultimately...I think much more about what does 10 years look like than 12 months look like. Because this is the beginning of the commercial financial service wave. And so, you know, I think we ultimately believe the digital transformation is going to reinvent our industry. And if we can go lead the way, we'll be very happy. QAnd for us that just means continue growing, continue serving our customers, continue hiring, you know. I think if we do all that, you know, right place right time. >> John: Awesome...final question for you. To the folks out there watching, you're an expert in the industry...again, fintech as well as computer engineering. If my sister who is not savvy says, "Jeremy, what is Blockchain?" How would you describe Blockchain to someone who's interested and needs to know the definition and importance of Blockchain? >> Jeremy: Okay, so Blockchain, to me, is basically a way to be able to take information like you might have on your checkbook, or you might have in a spreadsheet, and use it where anybody can access it in a way that's actually easily, controllable, visible, secure, and automated. That doesn't sound very sexy, but the important thing is how we keep records affects all of society, right? We have records of who owns their houses, we have records of how much money we have in our account, we have records of who did we vote on, right? Those records are the foundation for our society. Currently companies own those records. Companies are fallible, right? And so what Blockchain does is it allows us to make a more infallible system to keep access to those records you and I care about. >> John: And this is an infrastructure opportunity, not so much crypto currency... kind of a distinction between the two, right? >> That's right, that's right. I would say crypto currency and money is like the first pillar app on top of Blockchain. >> John: Jeremy Almond, CEO, founder of PayStand, hot company, doing something really good in a growing, changing market called checks, paper checks, and if you have them and groan, digitize them. Great entry strategy for Blockchain. Thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. And thanks for joining us here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier in the Cube Studios for Cube Conversations. Thanks for watching. (exciting orchestral music)

(orchestral music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation here at Palo Alto studios, at the Cube office yeah I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and also co-host the Cube. Our next guest is Jeremy Almond is the CEO of Paystand, hot startup doin' some really new things in and around blockchain, decentralize, and really targeting the B2B space on a really compelling and interesting topic that a lot of people are interested in. Jeremy welcome to this Cube conversation. >> Awesome, thank you John. >> Hey so talk a little about the company, set the table for us, PayStand, what you guys are doing, why you were founded, and what's the disruptive enabler that you guys are taking, and what's the angle of your business? >> Yeah sure so, PayStand like you mentioned, is a B2B software platform, specifically focused on payment. So, you can imagine what Paypal or Venmo does from the consumer level, we do for complicated commercial transactions between accounts receivable and accounts payable departments that normally would be paying with paper checks in manual process. >> So basically accounting, ledger, I'm kind of guessing. Nice bit for blockchain. >> Correct, yeah, yeah. So, what we do is we apply blockchain technology to help a company speed up their time to cash, automate their business process and dramatically lower their transaction cost. >> I'll get your thoughts on this. I interviewed Don Tapscott at an event and we were riffing on this notion of the nature of the firm, right? People would come to an office, you'd have accounting, all these things that you'd have to put in place as systems. Now with this decentralized world we're living in, internet and with blockchain in particular, and a cryptocurrency market that's pretty frothy. But, you look at blockchain and you separate those two for a minute. You really can look at ways to change how work is organized. How do you guys view that, I mean, It's obviously a new, big wave coming. Then you've got businesses who are just trying to operate and make money, right? So, keep the lights on, but they also have to start rethinking about the future. So, what is this block wave, blockchain wave coming? How do you talk about that? Is it that disruptive? I mean, certainly centralized databases aren't going a away any time soon, but it's coming. What's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> It's coming. You know, I think it's... It will effect the enterprise, which is where we spend our time and space. In a lot of ways like cloud did. So, I've spent probably 15 years doing unsexy B2B tech in some way shape or form. And what we've seen is digital transformation in the enterprise has happened in a few key areas. CRM is now in the cloud. You have companies like Salesforce that have become significant. ERP is now in the cloud, you're financial software is now automated. Kind of ironically the last mile piece, the part that lubricates the business, the core of the business, the money movement piece, is actually still really, really manual. So, you have humans that sit around and they take an invoice and then a paper check and then they move it. And that process is very, very inefficient. And so, having a more automatic, smart financial system can improve the business's life in really significant ways. >> Also, you know, one of the things we've been commenting on opining here on the Cube is, I made a statement a couple weeks ago, OMAR tech, marketing technology, Wave, all those logos on those landscape slides, didn't really pan out cause the cloud kind of changed that. It's panning out, but not the way people thought. FinTech, financial tech, is also certainly important. Banks of safe trading, you see that. What is the inhibitor for these new trends? Because you mentioned moving paper around. I mean it's money, they probably don't want to mess with an operational system that's a quarter of their business. Is it fear? Is it tech? Both? What's your view on why it's taking so long? Or is it moving along at a speed you think is going to... Being adopted? >> Yeah, it's actually kind of a unique point in time right now. I think in one hand, financial services in general, part of their job is to manage risk. And so, they're going to be a lagging, in some ways, industry. And so, digital transformation, the internet has opened up and democratized media. It's opened up so many other areas. Blockchain, now, is the entry point for digital transformation of financial services. And so, the time is probably right now. We've been in the space. We started the company in 2014. I'd seen over the last three years, hearing banks, other large institutions, large enterprises go from skepticism to curiosity. >> What's the technology stack look like? Obviously, four years is like decades in the blockchain world. Obviously, people are running as fast as they can. It's kind of a moving train, at many levels, business model side, as well as the tech stack. And this is really the opportunity a lot of these systems-- I mean some of the e-commerce systems are 20 year old tech stacks, some are even older. Just going back four years since you were founded, what's the big moving glacier, if you will, of change and how are you guys managing that? And how should people think about managing the risk of the tech stack? >> Yeah, I mean, I think on the blockchain specific side, in the early days a lot of it was about currency and actual payment. I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity for blockchain, particularly in the enterprise, to actually dramatically improve their operations side. So, Ethereum, private blockchains, actually have the ability to, not just decentralize how money movement or networks operate, but how an internal system operates. I'll give you an example, we used the blockchain to-- A private blockchain to actually control approval work flow. So when a payment goes out, often times you need your accounts payable person to send a payment out, but the controller or the treasury or someone else has to sign off on it. So that signature, you need it to be valid, trusted, the identity around it, right? And you want an audit record. And so blockchains a really, really good use case for something like that. That's not pure play payments, it's not pure play settlement, it doesn't require a million people to get on. It just can operate in the business in a really critical function in a better way than the current technology does. >> It's interesting. I love these new technology opportunities, cause there's always going to be a tipping point and the famous Steve Jobs quote is, "Hey, if I was asked to build a better phone "in 2005 I would've built an excellent, better Blackberry" But then he built the Iphone, so he thought differently. No one was really asking for the Iphone. So, the question I get a lot from skeptics in blockchain is, no one's really asking for blockchain. So, again, this is kind of like, you could always say, I'm building a better centralized database system in a distributive computing environment. Okay, we've done that. >> Yeah >> Are people asking for blockchain? Or are they just asking for it in a different way? What's your thoughts to that? >> Yeah, I would say that there's a big picture question of are people ask for it? And I'd say, society is actually asking for it. Part of my personal story is, my family, blue collar family, my mother's side immigrated here, her generation. My brick layer father, they spent their entire lives getting their first home. 800 square foot home, it was nothing special, but it was their American dream. In 2008, in the financial crisis, they lost that house. And so I think society said financial services and core parts of our economy actually could-- we could do better. And I think the magic thing about technology is we get to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. So, one, I think society is actually asking for can the core parts of our economy actually do better? Can we dream up something better? I think that's the purest part of what the folks in the blockchain movement are trying to do. That's at a very high level. And then I think practically, right, for businesses like we operate day in and day out, if there's technology that allows them to be able to operate their business more efficiently, drop their costs and grow faster, how would that work? It's in some ways like cloud. How does cloud work? I think now we're really getting into the deep mess of it. But cloud was transformative to the business. VOIP was transformative to some businesses. Inbound marketing was transformative to some businesses. Blockchain is the same kind of concept. >> And cloud too, there's a lot of naysayers. I remember I use the first EC2 instances of Amazon, when it came out being an entrepreneur I don't have to have provision servers. This is amazing. And I can put credit card down and pay a few bucks? And then even still, up until three or four years ago, they were dismissed as relevant. And, again, the rest is history. Look what they've done. So, there's always going to be those naysayers. But, to the point about cloud and blockchain, and say even crypto, this is a wave and we are very bullish on this movement because we see the waves coming way out there and it's huge. And this is probably bigger than the other waves combined, in our opinion. So, you mentioned societal change. This is a big deal. You're seeing regulations right now in GDPR, in Europe. Trying to govern an old database market, that's even in an own problem. It's a mess database wise. But it makes sense from a society standpoint. People want to pull their data out. This is a trend. You've got societal forces and then technical legacy. This could be an opportunity for a blockchain to saying, hey optimize for the new wave, don't try to retrofit, say, an old wave. What's your thoughts? >> Correct. Yeah, I think there's a number of areas, even in the data side with society. Take an Enron scandal that happened a decade plus ago. Out of that came regulation called Sarbanes-Oxley. And Sarbanes-Oxley's concept is to ensure that companies publicly account for their records in the proper way. That there's an audit trail. That they don't, sort of, pick their financial systems and misrepresent them. The blockchain, because it's a source of truth that's immutable, meaning it can't be changed, is a great way to have more efficiency in that process. Today, there's a whole industry that's popped up just for Sarbanes-Oxley, just to regulate the financial system, just to ensure that the books actually say what their supposed to say. That's kind of the definition of what a smart contract can and should do. >> This is though, really an opportunity for entrepreneurs when you think about it. A lot of alpha entrepreneurs are really lickin' their chops on blockchain, because they can see how it could disrupt industries. And this is really, again, I showed you some things we're working on and what we're thinking about with SiliconANGLE about media and data. But it brings up things that we, obviously, see every day in the press. The election, weaponizing content for bed, things-- Facebooks having a challenge right now in how they optimize their data for their own self service reasons. This is a problem. This is a revolution. People are kind of tired. So, what's your view of the role of data to the human? Obviously the cliche, oh the users are in charge, they should own their own data. Okay, I get that, but how do you see that vision playing out? Not just from Facebook, that's just a social network example. But how does data impact a user going forward in your vision? Because they could really change from the outside in. >> Yeah, I think part of what's critical with data is two things. One, identity really matters. How do you manage identity? So, I think there's a number of really fascinating blockchain companies that are specifically focused on the identity question. And that's true around the social media side. It's true around, how do I actually manage where I move identity around? So, I think that's one side that's really, really critical to solve. I don't know that we've got a crystal ball yet on what it will ultimately look like. But the blockchain model for identity allows us to rethink the fabrics of what privacy is, what permission looks like and what trust looks like with people I want to engage with and with people I don't want to engage with. >> That's interesting. You talk about the blockchain culture being more societal and mission driven, my word, but you're kind of implying that. I remember when the cloud came out. It was, the network guys were in charge and the app guys had to feed off the network requirements. And then that seat changed, flipped around. The app guys are in charge, data is driving requirements for the network. Question for you is do you see a day soon where societal requirements will dictate technology? You're seeing that pattern kind of emerging now, kind of not yet been fully thought through in public commentary. We see the pressure points potentially impacting tech design. >> Yeah, I think there's actually a good tug of war balance. So, entrepreneurs naturally are going to run as fast as they can to see innovation. Hopefully with means of improving society. And then you have regulators and you have government agencies who are looking and saying okay, you might be thinking about one myopic view and we need to make sure we're looking at the good of society. And so, I think that tug of war you saw with the internet, where how much do we regulate the internet? And I think the balance was mostly healthy. And we're sort of seeing that through today with blockchain as well. Where things like ICOs have good and bad implications. The regulators have been watching it relatively closely. But they also haven't completely came down and clamped down on it. Even this week there's... There was a relative balance in the discussions that came out. >> The SECs done a great job. >> Correct. >> They've whipped a few people into shape, sent the signal, but they weren't foreclosing any innovation. >> That's correct. >> And ICOs certainly had some scams. What's the good sides of ICOs? Obviously the scams are out there. What's the good sides? The fundraising, democratization? What's your take on the ICO, initially coin offering opportunity? >> Yeah, I think in some ways democratization has become such a buzz word it's lost it's meaning. But if you think about what it really is it's so powerful, because it's this concept that we distribute power and control to the hands of many. And so, I think there are a lot of public, good technologies that actually can use that concept. The internet is a public good. You could agree Wikipedia is a public good. And so, utility type tokens actually are valuable, because they can have a dual nature to them. I think the other thing, that I'm particularly interested in watching how ICOs evolve, is-- I think there's some danger in ICOs coming in, in the early stage market. Because early stage companies tend to be... They're so nascent that they need guidance. And I actually, I might be contradictory here to most people in the blockchain space, but I actually think early stage investors have a lot of value in that space. And so, I am actually fascinated about what happens in later stage rounds and what do ICOs become there. So, I think utility and later stage rounds are actually two fascinating areas of ICOs. >> Jeremy, that's a great point. I would also say that the trend that we're seeing is: there's an early stage component that needs mentoring and needs some nurturing, I would agree with that. That's a classic VC-- Maybe some token economics in there, but again different playbook. The tokenization of business is really interesting, cause now you have token economics being applied to a pre-existing proven business with a disruptive nature on the other side. >> Correct. >> Is super interesting. So, I have to ask you. Are we going to have a chief economic officer as a new role soon? Or is that going to be-- Cause it made me think about token economics it's about opening up and changing the distribution, or data and wealth, you could argue both are the same. But how do you view that? Because that's a trend were seeing. The tokenization of a business to disrupt an industry incumbent, set of incumbents. >> Correct, yeah. And I think it's really, really early days in what... You have really early stage companies that are thinking about tokenizing their business before they exist. And then you have other companies which are maybe past the innovation curve and their trying to apply tokens to their business. >> A pivot of an old, existing business. >> Yeah, so we've seen these, right? Public companies that have added blockchain to their name. I think the fascinating thing will become where fast growing, real businesses where there's a there, there. They've crossed the chasm. Go, okay, how do we apply tokenization to our company? And how do we think about it, from both a commercial economic part of the business and then how do we think about it from tokenizing the business? We haven't seen many cases yet, but I actually think that's one of the next waves we'll see. >> Great. Great insight. I got to ask you, on a personal level, you're doing some talking, obviously your the founder of the company, CEO, what's goin' on? What are you talking about these days? What are you passionate about? I know your talking to some folks at University of Santa Barbara. You mentioned going to teach down there. What are you talking about? What are you sharing publicly? What's on your mind these days? >> Yeah, I think I'm personally deeply motivated every day by waking up and going. The financial service industry can go through a massive transformation. And I think there's a lot of really good companies doing that at the consumer level. And so, I think our space, we have a unique place and time to be working at the commercial level. So, the commercial level effects big parts of our economic infrastructures in ways that we don't think about. The Equifax breach was a pretty big deal to people, right? The financial crisis was a big deal to people. So, how do we imagine those kinds of industries? Supply chain, title, logistics. And how do we think about those industries democratizing them with blockchain? Those, to me, are the unsung heroes of what blockchain will ultimately help transform society. >> That's interesting. You said you were kind of humble when you came on earlier. I'm in boring areas of B2B, but I got to say, to see your point about cloud earlier. There's a calm before the storm, these boring areas that are, say, calm, are really the grounds where you see disruption. I think that's an area-- Not just high frequency trading, that's going to be always an issue, but in terms of real financial plumbing. Perfect for a ledger, perfect for those things. Okay, explain-- Take a plug for your company. How are people using you guys? What's the value proposition? What are some of the things you guys are involved in? How does someone engage with you guys? Give the plug for Paystand. >> Yeah, so at Paystand we tend to work with companies where there are high volumes of paper checks in the process. So if you have a hundred thousand dollar invoice that goes out, for example, with a company you've been working out with for a decade. And you have a contract that says it's a net 60 contract. The challenge is, it's paper check. You want to move it digitally. What do you move it digitally to? And the reality is, the consumer payment companies that are focused on credit cards are not really an ideal solution for that because their business model is a percentage business model. And there's nothing wrong with a percentage business model that charges a company two or three percent if I'm swiping for a five dollar cup of coffee. If it's a hundred thousand dollar payment that I owe someone that I know and I have a contract terms. I'm not going to pay the bank 3,000 dollars to move ones and zeros from this bank database to this bank database. So, what we do with our network is we make that money movement fast, instant, automatic, verified, validated with control, in a way that we can automate the process. >> It's so funny. What jumps into my mind is punchcards to computers, tape to duck storage. This is interesting. So, paper checks, probably big, I don't know what the numbers are, you might have them handy. People are doing paper checks. So, you're doing a system around paper checks, did I get that right? >> Yeah, so we digitized what would have been a paper check. Today, over 50 % of all commercial payments are still done in paper checks. So, they're gone in our digital world. You and I, we Venmo each other. But when the business goes to write a check, when they get an invoice they send out a check. And so we digitized the whole process. The moment that the invoice is ready to go to the moment it gets in the bank. It all becomes digital space. >> And the alternative is what? I got to go check when it was mailed, was it received, was it cashed, did it get put into the accounting system? And that's kind of, that's the manual-- >> That's the manual. So, they'll spend a week tracking down the payment. From the moment the controller says okay to pay, to the time it sits in their bank account. That's humans, time, money. >> And an old antiquated system that doesn't change because of what? >> Well it's legacy infrastructure in one way. But in another, even the banking infrastructure-- Most of the banking infrastructure that are for commercial payments was designed in the 60s and 70s. And last time I checked, the 60s and 70s was before the internet today. So, they weren't really designed for digital real time payments. And they weren't designed for commercially used cases like today. >> Is fraud a factor or is that not a factor? Or is that not a part of it? Or yes? >> Yeah, I think a key thing with what we do, enterprise payments, is security is really, really important. We take it very, very seriously. And this is, again, one of the down sides to the legacy commercial infrastructure is when you have a check, you have this checking and routing number on it. Anybody takes that, in theory, that's all that identifies you and your company and your account. Money can actually be moved and ran against in that case. With a network like ours, we can validate that you are who you say you are, you have the money in your account, it moved when it should and you've actually authorized it. These are all things that we should know, but we just don't. >> And you put the data around it. You take that payload, aka check, put it into the system. So, when does a company want-- Should be calling you? Is it like, I'm overloaded with paper. I want a new system. I'm doing a refresh. When do people call Paystand? What's the signals that would give your buyer some indicator of time to call Paystand? >> Yeah, so generally it's after-- It's when they have high volumes of checks and they're growing. And, or, that they've basically taken their ERP and they've done an ERP cloud migration. So, now they've got their general ledger and that financial system is not in a shoebox anymore, it's in a critical, core ERP system. And so, what they're finding is they bought digital transformation for financial services and their accountant only sort of has half the solution. And so they come in and they use us to close the last mile. >> Okay, so I'm going to put my naysayer hat on and ask you the question. I love it, but what's this blockchain thing? I'm an accounting guy. Look at one computer class or whatever, I get blockchain. How do you stay up to date? How do you ensure that I'm going to have a system that's going to be working? I know that blockchain standards are changing. How do you guys mitigate that? How do you handle that question? >> Yeah, I think the critical thing for our customers is for us, our customers, money moves in dollars. It leaves their bank account and goes into their supplier's bank account. The supplier's bank account goes into their customer's bank account. Their financial system does not change. We're actually very, very sensitive to that. We think about this very different than a consumers solution. Which is, consumer solutions almost have a critical mass question. They need everybody to get into the system for it to work. For commercial, you don't actually want to change the business process of your partners. It's really important, they've been doing this. So, we are very thoughtful about our software. It doesn't change business process. It doesn't require you to enter into come kind of new economy or new currency. You simply do what your always doing with the systems you're already using. And we just digitize the process to make them faster, cheaper and automated. >> Awesome. Talk about your goals for the year with Paystand. Where you guys at company wise? Funding? Goals? Hiring? What's going on? Give a quick final word on the company. >> Yeah, I think we're blessed right now. I would say we're one of, if not the fastest B2B payment companies, fastest growing B2B payment companies today. I think we have a long way to go. I would call this inning two for us. We ultimately-- I think much more about what does ten years look like than twelve months look like because this is the beginning of the commercial financial service way. And so, I think we ultimately believe that digital transformation is going to reinvent our industry. And if we can go lead the way we'll be very happy. And for us that just means continue growing, continue serving our customers, continue hiring. I think if we do all that... Right place, right time. >> Awesome. Final question for you. The folks out there watching, your an expert in the industry, again, FinTech as well as computer engineering. If my sister, who is not savvy, says Jeremy what is blockchain? How would you describe blockchain to someone who's interested and needs to know the importance definition and the importance of blockchain? >> Okay, so blockchain to me is basically a way to be able to take information like you might have on your techbook or you might have in a spreadsheet and use it where anybody can access it in a way that's actually easily controllable, visible, secure and automated. That doesn't sound very sexy, but the important thing is how we keep records effects all of society. We have records of who owns our houses. We have records of how much money we have in our account. We have records of who did we vote on. Those records are the foundation for our society. Currently, companies own those records. Companies are fallible And so, what blockchain does, is it allows us to make a more infallible system to keep access to those records you and I care about. >> And this is an infrastructure opportunity, not so much cryptocurrency, kind of a distinction between those two, right? >> That's right. I would say, cryptocurrency and money is like the first pillar app on top of blockchain. >> Jeremy Almond, CEO, founder of Paystand, hot company doing something really good in a growing, changing market called checks, paper checks. And if you have um', grow um', digitize them. Great entry strategy for blockchain. Thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. Thanks for joining us here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier in the Cube studios For Cube conversation, thanks for watching. (orchastral music)

(orchestral music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier. Where conversation around venture capital, entrepreneurship, crypto currencies, block chain, and more, Jonathan Ebinger our friend with BRV, formerly Blue Run Ventures, but BRV for short, sounds better, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks John, looking forward to it. >> Great to see you, we've known each other for a long time and you've been a great investor, your firm has done a lot of great stuff, deals are really famous deals, but also you dig into the companies and you really stand by your portfolio companies, but you've also done a lot of work in China. >> Yes. >> So you have a good landscape of what's going on. What's the, what's going on in China? >> Well China is really expanding in ways which we had not foreseen when we first started investing there almost 15 years ago. We were really active for five to 10 years, investing in companies that initially were considered copycat companies, you can't really use that term anymore. In fact what's happening more and more, you're seeing Chinese ideas coming to the United States. Businesses like We Chat are being copied as fast as they can, you're seeing Snapchat, Messenger and so forth, they're quickly trying to amalgamate as many assets as they can within their viewership much like we're seeing in a lot of the other Chinese analogs over there. It's exciting to see, it's very much an arms race. >> It's been interesting to watch. We were at the Ali Baba Cloud Conference last year, at the end of last year, it's interesting the innovation and entrepreneurial thirst has really changed. If you go back just 10 years ago when you guys were first getting in there, I remember the conversations were what's going on in China, it's very developmental but what's going on 10 years ago, they are dominating the mobile space, they're mobile usage is really much different makeup in how they do startups, the apps. How much of that has influenced some of their success just the demand? >> Always on, location always available, it opens up a whole new level of communication services. The idea of the larger screen format, people used to think in the United States, these large devices coming out of Korea first and then China, we thought these would never play in the United States, now Apple 10, larger screen size, it makes sense, it's mobile first right from the get go for a now billion plus users. >> So BRV, how many active portfolio companies do you guys have and what's the profile that you're looking for for entrepreneurs, what are some of the kind of companies? >> We're about 45 active companies right now. We're putting about, we're putting money in about 10 new companies a year at this point. We have a very disciplined approach of investing in Series A style companies, Series A of course means a lot of different things to people, but generally, we like to put $3 to $5 million to work early on and then follow on. >> How much do take for that, just a third? >> Typical in the 20%-25% range. There's a lot of companies out there that still fit that profile. Of course you're seeing some super sized Series A's that happen, we don't play in those but for the traditional software companies, evaluations are really right in our sweet spot. >> How big is the fund now, just what's the number in terms of capital? >> We're in fund six, we're just over $150 million. >> And you got to save some for follow on rounds. >> Exactly. >> Talk about the changes in venture capital because what's interesting, I had a conversation with Greg Sands with Costanoa Ventures, another great investor, formerly I think the first employee of Netscape I think or the business plan. Great guy, he talked about the dynamics of, you don't need that much cash anymore because if you can get unit economic visibility into what the business is working, you can do so much more with that and I'm calling it the hourglass effect, you get through that visibility, you're in control, you own your own destiny, versus the old Silicon Valley model which seems to be fading away, which is hey, what do you need? $40 million, or here's $100 million. That really limits your exit options and sometimes you can drown in your own capital. Talk about that dynamic. >> You're seeing the $40 million rounds with businesses that are much more capital intensive and that's coming back in vogue now but for the most part, I agree with what Greg's saying and this whole advent of seed funds and super seed funds and angel funds and so forth has been really great for the traditional series A investor. A lot of that early fundamental and foundational work is being done and then when the series A comes, it's more about expansion so we're effectively getting what was a Series B type stage company now we're investing in Series A. We're saying hey, this product works, there's product market fit, let's put dollars to work to really grow the market. >> So you're saying Series B was a kind of prove the business model, shifted down to the A because the cost to get there is lower and hence that's opened up a seed round lower in numbers, so it just shifts down a little bit. >> It really has, it really has and that plays into our sweet spot. We really like working on business models, distribution strategies, things like that. >> And what kind of startups do you want to invest in? What are some of the categories? >> Love financial services, we like health tech, we're doing education, we're really pretty omnivorous when it comes to the sector. What we're looking for is really businesses that are using data, real time data to disrupt the numbers. >> So you're not sector driven, you're disruption oriented. >> That's right. >> Okay let's talk about disruption, my favorite trend. Obviously I love the China dynamic because you're not sure what it is, but it's really doing well so you can't ignore it and they're innovative and they're hustling hard and they've got massive numbers. Block chain, we're super excited about, we love crypto, we think it's the biggest wave coming out there, so a lot of my smart, entrepreneurial friends are jumping on their surfboards literally and jumping out into those waves and there's a lot of action there. At the same time, people are saying, stay away from that crypto thing, it's a scam. Kind of a different perspective, what's your thoughts on that? >> If you look at, you separate the cryptocurrencies from block chain, I think it becomes a lot more clear. Block chain is for real. Tracking provenance on transactions, real estate transactions, multinational transactions, makes a lot of sense, dovetails nicely with security, so there's a real business there. You saw the announcement with IBM and Mersk the other day, what they are taking enterprise level block chain into their whole supply chain. I think that's really important. We have a company in the category called pay stand which is doing the same sort of thing with smaller size businesses, just accelerating the whole process on accounts receivable, taking working capital. >> And they're doing block chain for that? >> Yes block chain is an option, we're not forcing people onto block chain, but the idea of hey, let's give people more cost effective ways to transact, get rid of the paper checks, get rid of the invoicing and just join the modern world, much like you use Venmo if you and I are going to exchange money. >> That's pay stand, that's one of your hot companies. >> Yeah it is, absolutely. >> So are they using block chain or not? >> They are, yes. >> Okay, because it's a physical asset, it's kind of a supply chain thing? >> They use it to track the funds themselves, unlike a credit card where you have to pay a big fee or ACH which you can't really get proof of funds, with their block chain technology, you can be sure that you have the funds available and you get it instantly. >> Let's talk about use cases that you think out there, I'd like you to just weigh in on use cases for block chain that a mainstream person that's not in the tech business would understand, because they say, is it real or not? I agree block chain is legit, what are some use cases that would highlight that? >> I think if you've ever been involved in real estate, bought a home, things like that, just tracking title insurance, you're going all the way back if you live in California, you're going all the way back to pre-statehood days, you have to track the provenance of that land all the way through. You're paying title insurance, title insurance is a business you don't really need if you have accurate provenance tracking through block chain. I think that's one most of us can understand. Obviously bills of weighting with things coming over on ships. That's natural and right now things get held up in port because people are trying to find a clipboard before you can sign off on who, is this bill of weighting actually clean, that stuff can be done automatically with 2D barcodes, block chain usage. >> Certainly with perishable goods too, we learned that with IBM's example. >> Sure. >> Okay let's get into the hot companies you got going on. Name some of the hot investments that you've done. >> Sure, well I talked about pay stand a minute ago, really excited about them, another one we really like is a company called aerobotics. I know you're a fan of autonomous flying. If you think about drones and everyone knows DJI and they're a great company, that's one to one, one person flying one drone, that's not scalable obviously, it scales at one to one. With autonomous flying, you can have a whole army of drones out doing your business, whether they're doing site exploration, checking for chemical spills, looking at traffic and so forth. The company is now operating in three continents, it's just, if you think about what a drone is, effectively it's a flying cell phone. It's a cell phone that goes around, takes pictures, transmits data back, we know something about cell phones at BRV, we've been investing in this category for a long time so when we say aerobotics come along, we said this is just a natural extension of real time data, cellular technology, and location based services. >> You guys don't get a lot of credit as much as you should, in my opinion on that, you guys were very early on the mobile, mobile connectivity side and mobile footprint and device and software. That's playing well into the hottest trend that we see, that's not the sexiest trend, that's IOT. >> Absolutely. >> Because drones are certainly, industrial IOT is a big one. Instrumenting physical plants, equipment, and IOT in general the edge of the network. What's your thoughts on IOT and how would you, how do you see that evolving? It's more than just the edge of the network issue, it's bigger. >> It is, well of course the devices and sensors are important. I think a lot of that's been commoditized. The business that we've been seeing develop and there's a lot of folks, they've moved from analytics of the web to analytics of IOT, so there's a lot of interesting companies coming in the analytic space. We're not playing in that as much, we tend to like to invest in companies that are big enough that you need to have analytics for them. We like companies that have proprietary control of analytics versus necessarily running analytics for company X. >> So you're not poopooing IOT per se, just that from an investment thesis standpoint, it's not on your radar yet. >> That's right, they're either too capital intensive for us as a firm or you're basically managing someone else's data. I want to be in companies that we're managing our own data for a proprietary advantage. >> That's really what I was going to get to next, the role of data driven, so we've lived in dupe world, theCUBE started in 2010 in the offices of Cloud Air actually and people don't know the history and it's been interesting, Hadoop was supposed to save the world, the data, but it really started the data trend, the data driven trend, Mike Olsen, Amar Omadala and the team over there really nailed it but it didn't turn into be just Hadoop, it's everything so we're seeing that now become a bumper sticker, data driven marketer, I'm a data driven executive, I'm a data driven interviewer, all that stuff, what does it actually mean? What does data driven mean to you? >> Data is, there's big data and then there's actionable data obviously people talk about exhaust, the data coming off, we really got started with, as you know, we were investors in Waze, awful lot of data coming out of your cell phone, extracting just the important pieces of it are really what's important. We're investors in a company called Cabbage which looks at every transaction a small business makes to determine their credit worthiness. It's really the science. People talk about data scientists, what do they actually do? What they're actually doing is separating out the wheat from the chaff because it's just a crush of data. I saw your interview with Andy Jazzy to other day from AWS, the amount of data that's being stored, it's almost unfathomable but the important people. >> They have a lot of data. You'd like to invest in them now. >> Exactly, but that's really the thing, it's being able to separate the good data from the bad. >> You look at Amazon, I was talking to Jesse and he didn't really go there because he was kind of on message but when I talked with Swami who runs the AI group over there, we were talking about, I said to him straight up, I'm like, you're running a lot of workloads on your cloud, I'm sure you have data on those workloads. Just the impact of what they could do with that data. This is the virtuous cycle that their business model is made up of, but it's changing the game for what they can become. The thing that we're seeing in the data world is, sometimes the outcome might not be what you think because if you can use the data effectively, it's a competitive advantage, not a department. >> Right and you have to really stay true to your commitment to data. What we've seen happen is when companies, if you've been around for 10 years or so, you start to trust your gut, that's important, but it can also not lead you to see obvious conclusions because the world changes. >> And also committing to data also means from a practitioner's standpoint, investing in the tech, investing in things to be data driven, not just to say it. >> Exactly. >> Okay so what's the future for you guys? What are you looking at next year, what are some of the things you'd like to accomplish for investment opportunities, besides getting all the hot deals, you did Waze, that was an amazing deal, one of my favorite products, how did that go down? How many people passed on Waze? >> I don't know how many people passed, but we were lucky, they wanted to bring us in to the initial syndicate, they wanted to have some folks who understood. >> But it wasn't that obvious though at the beginning. What was the original pitch? >> The initial pitch was that they were going to have folks have the dash devices, the product would sit on your dashboard and they were going to be using it to map Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe was just coming into the Western world and they didn't really have good roads and good maps. We thought, that's interesting but they probably also don't have smartphones, so why don't we come across the Atlantic and let's make this thing work in the US and then from there, the rest took off country by country we were the number one navigation app in I think 150 countries at one point. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned over the past few years in the industry that's different now I mean obviously there's some context that I'll share which is obviously the big cloud players are becoming bigger, scale's a big thing, you got Google, you got Microsoft and Amazon, you've got Facebook's out there as well. Then you get the political climate. You go to Washington D.C. and New York, Silicon Valley is not really talked highly about these days on the hill in Washington, yet GovCloud is completely changing the game of how the government is going to work with massive innovations and efficiencies, literally overnight, it's almost weird. >> It is and it isn't. If you look at it through a longer term horizon, Silicon Valley is again at the forefront, we're really the first ones with more transparency in the industry, all the different movements which are really important and all the conversations that are happening are important and they're happening here first. I think you're starting to see a ripple effect, you're seeing it going through entertainment, you're going to see it in the government, industry after industry I think is going to start to have to be more open as Silicon Valley has led the way on that. >> That's a great point. Take a minute to describe the folks out there watching that aren't from here, what is Silicon Valley about in your opinion? >> Silicon Valley is, of course it's more than a mindset, but folks who are here are here on purpose. They come here intentionally. There are very few people that I know who were born and raised here, so they're coming here because they want to be part of a shared ethos around success, around success, around shared values and competition so it's a very healthy environment, I came, I used to live in Washington D.C. and I couldn't be happier to be 3000 miles away. >> If you're a technology entrepreneur, this is where all the sports and action is, as I always say, we always love sports analogies. Okay, I got to ask you about the VC situation around ICOs, initial coin offerings are being talked about as an alternative to fundraising, there's some security options on token sales as a utility, the SEC has started to put some guidelines down on what that looks like, but the general sentiment is, it's a new way to raise money and some people are doing private rounds with venture capital and doing token sales through ICOs. You see some hybrids, but for the most part, the hard core I don't want to say right or left wing, is there a wing of the political spectrum, but the hard core ICO guys are like, this is all about disrupting the VC community and you're a VC, so you got to take that a little bit personal but the point is, what do you think about that? Is that talked about? >> I think that's good salesmanship. The VC industry such as it is, you can fit every VC into one section of Stanford stadium. There just aren't that many VCs to really go after. We're a small group of folks. I think that going after maybe disrupting the way folks are raising money through Kickstarter and things like that, that's all great. We're not going to stop it, we're going to embrace it. I think that there's plenty of different ways to raise capital, I have no compunction about those things. >> Do you think it's more of a democratization trend or a new asset class, so you don't see it disrupting the VCs per se, but if it's only a handful of VCs that could fit into Stanford Stadium, for instance, then certainly there's more options, it's a dilution. >> I think you look at it as it's just an alternative financing method, do I take debt, do I take equity, do I take venture, do I take friends and family? It's just one more arrow in the quiver of the entrepreneur, I think you have to be smart about it because thinking that you're going to get the same level of attention from an investor in your ICO that you are going to get from a series A investor who owns 20% of your company, those are two very different value propositions. >> So you see a lot of pitches and sometimes, you have to say no a lot and that's the way the game is, but a lot of times, you want the best deals. But the founders' side of the table, they're looking at the VC, I need money. So that's one of the options, what they really want is a value added partner, so what's your current take on what that means these days? Sometimes it means a firm, sometimes it means a partner, sometimes it means the community. How are you guys looking at BRV as value add versus the worst case scenario which is value subtract, you just want to have that be positive. >> I see that written about venture too. >> I know, some people experienced it. >> I think it helps that we've been around now for almost 20 years, we got started in '98 so you have to look at our body of work and the continuum of investments and founders and CEOs and CTOs that we've invested in. There's hundreds and hundreds of people who have taken money from BRV, and so that's one of the real positives about this current state we're in is that there's so much transparency. The fact that we are, I like to think we're good actors and have been for a long time, that comes out, now through our words but through the words of. >> What would they say about you guys? What would your entrepreneurs say about BRV? >> Aside from using buzzwords like value add, they say, they know their industry, they're not afraid to ask for help, they try to call problems when they see it, things like that. >> You stand by your companies. >> Absolutely. >> Awesome, well what's your favorite trend that you're personally interested in? >> I think you have to go after health care right now. It is just such a big market right now. People have been nibbling all different sides of it right now, there's been folks who are trying to expedite processing, there's actual innovations happening on the medical side, I think there is just, technology is just now starting to get into that, technology has gotten into education. >> How about the startup you guys funded that's related to the health care field. >> Yes, we're in a company called Hello Heart which is really at the confluence of a number of trends. It starts off, what Hello Heart is, it's a personal blood pressure cuff for you as an employee of a big company, more and more companies are starting to self insure. If you're a big enough company, 10,000 plus employees or even fewer, you're going to want to self insure to save money but also, your employees get very much more comfortable with you as an employer, you care about my well being, so it's a very virtuous cycle for the employees. >> So companies themselves insuring their own employees. >> Absolutely. >> They have to be super big, this company. >> This is just one component of a self insured business. You also, of course you still have access to doctors and stuff, I'm not making the pitch for being self insured as a company, I'm just saying that. >> But that's a trend. >> It's absolutely a trend and you're seeing a lot of what I would call point solutions stepping in, whether it's psychiatric, whether it's opioid help, whether it's working on heart conditions, these are all different point solutions which are being amalgamated together to help companies which are self insuring. >> So is Hello Heart for consumers or for business? >> It's sold to businesses but individual employees have it so they can keep track of their blood pressure. >> But I can't buy one if I wanted one? >> Not today, but I'll make sure I can get one to you. >> I need one, get all of our employees instrumented. >> Exactly. >> Drug tested all that stuff going on. People worry about the privacy, that's something I would be concerned with, putting. >> That's taken a really fast pendulum swing. A few years ago, Generation X was privacy, there is no privacy, the default was, location is always on, that's just flipped 180 degrees in the last few years. >> Well Jonathan, thanks for coming into this CUBE conversation, I want to ask you one final question, one thing we're passionate about is women in tech and underserved minorities, obviously Silicon Valley has to do a better job, it's out on the table, and it's working but we're still seeing a lot more work to be done, we're seeing titles not being at the right level, but pay's getting there in some places but titles aren't, some paying still below for women, still a lot more to do, what are you guys doing for the women in tech trend, how are you guys looking at that? Certainly it's a sensitive topic these days, but more importantly, it's one that's super important to society. >> It is, I think like a lot of things that have long term value, it's really about your actions versus your words, so our firm has two out of the five investment professionals are female, one of the last three CEO's we've founded is a female CEO, we have technologists, we have marketing people, we have CEO's that are females it's very much of a cross the board, sex, race and so forth. >> You guys are indiscriminate, a good deal's a good deal. >> Exactly right. >> It's about making money, VC's are in the business of making money, a lot of people don't understand, you guys have a job to do but you do a good job. >> We're in the business of making money but our investors for the most part are not for profits. Large universities, our biggest investor is the Red Cross, so when we do well, the Red Cross does well and the country does well. >> You're mission driven at this point. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design or is that just, your selection? >> We're delighted with our LP's, it's important that we have synergies aside from just finances with our investors. >> That's super well, I appreciate you coming on, I think it's super great that you're tying society benefits into money making and entrepreneurship, great stuff Jonathan Ebinger here on theCUBE, BRV check them out, great VC firm here in Silicon Valley. It's a CUBE conversation, we're talking about startups and entrepreneurship I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, Spain, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is day two of our exclusive coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. Last night was a great night of customer meetings. We stumbled into the CIO meeting, we were at the-- >> And were quickly ushered out. (both laugh) >> We were at the analyst event, and of course we met our good friend Dr. Tom Bradicich at the analyst meeting. This is the man who brought a lot of the IOT Initiative into HPE. He's the general manager of the IOT and Systems division. Great to see you again, Dr. Tom. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you Dave and Peter, it's great to be here at theCUBE, great to be here at HPE Discover Madrid. Lots of great things happening, I can't wait to tell you about 'em. >> So we're very excited to have you on. John Furg and I interviewed you in the very early days after you came over from your previous company, and you had this sort of vision of, you know, bringing the HPE into the intelligent edge. >> Yes. >> And we're like okay, this sounds really complicated. You got ecosystem, you got all kinds of technologies that you gotta develop. Hardware, software. And you're making it happen. It's become a meaningful portion of HPE's business, so I know you got a long way to go, but congratulations on the progress so far. >> Thank you. Give us the update on the-- >> Well, first of all, thank you for that, I appreciate it. I must give credit to my team, I tell them all the time that if you don't execute and do the work, I'm just a science fiction writer. (interviewers laugh) And the vision has come about, and we have real customer deployments of course that the, you know, the proof of it. >> Right. >> At first we had no products and no customers, now we have these products that we'll talk about, and we have the customer deployments, and we're changing things for businesses at the edge, and again the edge is just not the data center. And the manufacturing floor, we'll talk about refineries, oil rigs, those type of edges. We're doing a lot of work there. And it's been exciting to see the ideas that we have get adopted by not only customers, but the industry, so we're seeing other analysts pick up on two dimensions: computing at the edge, and a little more complicated one, a little more difficult to grasp, is converged OT and IT at the edge, the two worlds of operational technology converging with IT. We were on theCUBE talking with an OT partner, National Instruments, a long while ago, and now we literally have those products in the market in the hands of customers. National Instruments is reselling the Edgeline 1000, the Edgeline 4000 products, as well as of course us selling it, and it's pretty exciting to see this happening. >> Well what I love about that conversation is, you know, when we first started to talk to you, we said okay, let's play the skeptic, analysts are skeptic. >> Sure. >> And we said one of the big problems you're gonna face is bringing the organizations together, OT and IT. They're just different worlds, oil and water, you know, you got hardcore engineers and you got IT guys, and then subsequent to that conversation, you bring on National Instrument, right? >> Yes. >> And we have that conversation. Okay, so we sit down, I check that box, at least they're having conversations. Can you talk about how that convergence is actually occurring, and what's in it for the customer? >> Well great. To talk about this convergence, the best thing to do is say it can happen at several levels. It can happen at a solutions level, it can happen at a software level and a hardware, physical level. Let's talk about a physical level, it's a little more tangible to understand. Let me use the smartphone, which everybody has. Like Peter, you have one there. If you hold that up, you will notice inside the manufacturer of that phone converged, or integrated, those are synonyms, many consumer devices. Such as what? A music player, of course, the phone, of course. But also many other things. A GPS system. >> Camera. >> A camera. The list goes on, right? We can go on. Oh, the flashlight, and by the way, your wallet. Maybe not your wallet, but a millennial and younger's wallet-- >> Yeah, sure. >> Is in that phone. >> My wallet's in it. >> My wallet's in it. >> In it, and-- >> Venmo, baby. >> That's right. (all laugh) >> I have my kids' wallets in there too. >> Oh that's great, you've done that switch. So what is happening there obviously is the notion of we're, you know, software defining and we're converging. Now the benefits of that are irrefutable. One thing you buy, it's less energy. One thing to manage, the convenience of carrying it around. Let's take that metaphor and impute it at, let me say a manufacturing floor edge. There's lots of edges out there. We go to a manufacturing floor edge, we see several devices, just like the early pioneers of the smartphone saw a consumer with a camera around his neck, a GPS on his belt, text, right, a flashlight, a wallet, and all this. We see all these devices out there, and what are they? Some of 'em are OT, as you mentioned. Operational technology devices such as control systems, such as data acquisition systems. >> Real-time systems. >> Real-time systems, industrial networks. CAN, PROFIBUS, SCADA solutions and networks. And the second thing we see is some IT. Most of it's closed, so this is important. It's good IT, meaning computing and storage, but a lot of it is closed systems. It's not the open EXEDY 6 architecture that we so enjoy in the data center. So those things are out there. We looked at 'em and we put them all in one box, just like the smartphone is one device. What are the benefits? Lower space, there's not a lot of space at the edge. Lower energy, there's not a lot of energy, right, at the edge. But the more profound benefits that we're seeing, and we have a large auto manufacturer who has deployed this on their manufacturing line, is it keeps uptime higher. In other words, it reduces downtime. So if the manufacturing line stops, there's nothing worse than a manufacturing line stopped, except perhaps an empty one. But the point is, when a manufacturing line stops, you can't put out product. You can't put out product, you can't recognize revenue get it in the consumer's hands. It's very obvious. It's an air-tight business case, actually. So we're able to reduce any downtime, why? Because first of all, everything's together, and secondly, we're able to manage it just like we're managing the data center because it's an open EXEDY 6 architecture. >> So you're converging tasks as well as hardware. >> As well as hardware, and then the next step is software, you know, as well. We just launched a new class of software called the Edgeline Services Platform, and this is OT software. So we're talking OT functions like aggregators and things that do OT technologies and some IT, but because we have so much compute power and it's open, it's EXEDY 6, it can run software like VMware, Microsoft Products, even database products as well. But because we have that, we're able to software define. When you software define, and I'll use the wallet again. You don't have a billfold with your license anymore. Plastic and leather has been software defined, and therefore it's less to deal with. It's much more efficient. So that announcement of our software strategy along now with our hardware strategy is very exciting for us, and customers are very much interested in it. >> So do you have some examples, you know, some real world examples? Customers that you can talk about where you're bringing together OT and IT disciplines? >> Yeah, you bet. Yeah, you bet. Let me talk about a large global beverage and snack company, and they make snacks, and in this case, potato chips. So a potato chip is a product, and the idea of having them come out of the line in the bag and be a higher quality is important. So we took an Edgeline System, the EL 1000, and we put it at the edge, and we were able to software define several of their IT and OT components and get it to a consolidation and integration in one box. Now what that did is it allowed the, and will do, is allowed the foods to move faster. So if they move across the conveyor belt faster, you can bag them faster, get 'em out to the consumer. The second thing is because it's so powerful, this is interesting. Now they can use video cameras to inspect the quality. Now think about that. That's not necessarily a new idea, but what is new is the notion that you can take video, which I think you'd agree is the largest data, is that right? A video is big, big data. >> We know that well. >> Especially if it's high, Yeah, especially if it's higher resolution, and your hosting costs are telling you that as well, right? Of all these videos. But if it's high resolution, and because you're looking for, you know, defects, indeed, one has to process that not only in high resolution, massive data, number one. Number two, quickly, because the thing is moving, and you wanna know to knock it off or stop or whatever the case may be. So what has happened there is my team and I did not think of that. Our customers thought that, well because you gave us this platform, we can now enhance it with a new type of sensor called a camera, with a new type of data, called video, to enhance our quality and keep our process moving faster. >> So keeping this converged notion going, you're converging the hardware, which is, you know, important. You're converging a lot of the administrative tasks. >> Yes. >> Which reduces the likelihood of any single human failure bringing the whole system down, but now you're talking about, in the whole sense, infer, and act loop that typifies what happens at the edge, you're converging new technologies into that loop by being able to add new data type, bring modeling, machine learning, analytics, in the infer, and then being able to act right there, which allows you to think about new invention, new innovation very, very rapidly because you have the processing power to converge all that new function as it becomes better understood. Have I got that right? >> You got it right. I serve as an adjunct professor at university, so let me position it in an easy way to learn. You said sense, infer, and act. Let's just call 'em the three A's. Acquire, analyze, and act. >> Okay. >> It's just easier to remember. And let me talk to that too, but this is actually just synonyms. So the acquisition of the data is through sensors in D to A conversion, or let me say A to D, analog to digital. Because most of these phenomenon, video for example, it has to be, is a light phenomenon. Moisture, pressure. At Duke Energy, for example, the second largest energy provider I worked on that industrial internet of things solution, and vibration was the thing that needed to be acquired and then analog to digital. Now the analysis has to take place. There are seven reasons to analyze at the edge. There are seven reasons not to send the data to the cloud. In the past, we have talked about it. One of them's latency, one of them's cost, one of them's bandwidth, another one is security, another one is reliability, another one is geofencing and policy, another one is duplication and security, you know, hostile or just, you know, reliability drop packets. There's a lot of issues to do that analysis there. But because we have a non-compromised full EXEDY 6, in fact, 64 in one box. 64 Xeon, Intel Xeon product in one box. We don't have to compromise the stack. We can take it directly out of the data center and run things like artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms. We can virtualize, we can containerize, we can run Citrix applications at the edge to have better access to the data and of course the application. But you're absolutely right, and then the second thing in this point is we move from the middle A, analysis right, to the action. The reason, I've learned this doing many IOT deployments. The reason people do an IOT deployment is to act. Yes, it's exciting to collect data. It's also exciting to analyze it. But have you ever been in a business meeting where you sit and you analyze data and you give tremendous insights, and one conclusion is pit against another conclusion and it cancels out all conclusiveness, and then you talk and you analyze, and you walk out and nothing happens, there's no action. Many of us have been in that. That's the idea here. You can't stop at the analysis, even though artificial intelligence, deep algorithms, moving averages, signatures that we can compare are very powerful. Well, what do you do when you do that? Because we have control and actuation systems built into Edgeline, we literally in a physically space, as well as in a logical process, as you pointed out, close that loop. >> Right. >> Acquire, analyze, act, acquire, analyze, act. Yes, connect to the cloud or the data center if we need to, but the issue is you don't have to. Now here's what's profound about that. This system at the edge can be managed and run the same stacks as any cloud or data center. I'm gonna use those as synonyms because a cloud is just a data center that nobody's supposed to know where it is. So a data center far away on the corporate campus or in a public or private cloud somewhere, is managed the same way. When that happens, we are revolutionizing workload management. Now, I spent a lot of years in my former time in IT and building data centers and building some of the first clouds, workload management's a big deal. How do you shift the workload to the free server? >> Peter: Right. >> Or to the free resources, right? To optimize, obviously. And it's a packing problem many times in the data center. Well now we've introduced another place to workload manage. >> Right. >> It's called the edge, it's far away. So we workload managed in the data center, then the cloud was invented, that's the first off premises. The next off premises is now the edge. So the other off premise is the edge. So now we have a workload management capability. Do you wanna do 100% processing at the edge where the action is, and where the acquisition is? Do you wanna do 100% in the cloud? That's still possible. Do you wanna do 50-50? Would you like to do 10-90? Would you like to do 30-70? You get my point. >> Totally. >> I can shift this, and depending on the season, depending on issues like disaster recovery, depending on your workloads, you can now do that, and again, you can do this with the Edgeline 1000, the Edgeline 4000, because of the processing power and the converged OT inside it. >> Well our observation is that it's not about bringing your business to the cloud, it's about bringing the cloud to your business. >> Yes. >> So bringing that sense of workload management. You know, you might say the cloud is just a virtualized data center when you come right down to it. So bringing all those capabilities and bringing them to wherever the data requires it. And there's gonna be a lot of instances where the data is gonna be at the edge, stay at the edge, but that doesn't mean you don't want all the benefits of how you run computing data at the edge where that data is. >> Yeah, and we're not obviating, we're offering choice. >> Right. >> But again, there are seven reason I went over why you do it here, but I've had a customer say none of those seven matter. So okay, we send everything to the cloud, and we have great cloud hybrid IT products that do that. >> Yeah. >> And we've envisioned a three-tier data model, you know, real time at the edge. >> Yes. >> Maybe you don't persist everything, but like you said, there are a lot of reasons not to move all the data back. But there is maybe a spot where you aggregate some of that data from discrete devices, and sure, if you wanna do some deep modeling in the cloud, go for it. And that cloud might be the public cloud, it might be your own private cloud. Does that seem reasonable to you? >> Very reasonable, and another reason for a cloud is it's an aggregation point for other, in this case, manufacturing lines where other smart cities to come together, because you're not gonna connect every city, every plant, any to any. You'll have a hub and spoke model where the cloud serves as that hub. So there are always reasons, and that's why, you know, if you look at our company, the pillars of our company, Pointnext services, the second pillar is hybrid IT, primarily focused on cloud and data centers, and the third is the intelligent edge. And those all play very, very closely together, in fact we have edge to core strategies, we have edge to core offerings with partners like NVIDEA, with partners like SAP, with partners like SAS, we have edge to core. For example, Schneider as well, Schneider Electric. All of them are looking at this idea, GE, Microsoft Azure, let's go to the edge. And two years ago, that was not the case, right? Let's go there, when you go to the edge, what are you gonna run it on? Well, let's not force our software partners to re-architect like they used to have to to run at the edge, which is like I'd call that drive-by analytics. You just have to cut out everything because it only ran on a wimpy core somewhere or a little device. No, let's move the entire data center capability out to the edge, when I was presenting this to one of our partners, the CEO of the company, I was presenting this vision, and he was texting during my talk 'cause I was boring. (interviewers laugh) And then I said this, this is a very powerful company, I won't mention names. Then I said, we're gonna move data center class technology out to the edge. It's not gonna be in compromised cores or limited memory or a little bit of storage. It's the very things in the data center we'll harden called Edgeline. We'll add controls systems and data acquisition, we'll put it out at the edge. He stopped texting. Then he looked up at me and said, "Wow, you're really moving a data center out to the edge." and you just said that, right? It's the cloud is coming. It's almost a reverse idea of what was happening before. >> Well you wrote a blog recently. >> Yes. >> About the space edge. So I wanted to ask you about that. What's going on in the space, and that's the ultimate edge, I guess. >> The infinite edge. >> The infinite edge. Explain what you guys are doing there and why it's important. >> Well, this is exciting. Space travel for exploration and eventually colonization, if you would believe that, is happening. We have the first supercomputer technology in a NASA spaceship now. It has orbited the Earth well over 1,000 times and it is doing thousands of benchmarks and is doing very well, isn't failing. Now, why is that profound? Because again, that edge is so far away and the ability to push that back to Earth now, which we could call the data centers on Earth, is limited. It takes minutes, sometimes even longer. There's issues with reliability as well. So we were able to do that, and then we've created a new thing called Project Extreme Edge, where we're going to build Edgeline systems that will fit better with lower energy, smaller size in spaceships, and eventually in colonization, but we're just going into space travel and exploration right now. And I'd like to mention that HP Labs is a great participant in this because they're working on a technology, and the name of it is called the Dot-Product Engine. And dot-product is a mathematical operation needed in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. But we're able to use that technology because it's small, it's fast, faster than we believe anything else on the market, and also it has a low energy profile. And those are all any edge, obviously, but it's also great for the space edge, and I like to quote Frank Sinatra when he said if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere, New York, New York. (laughs) Well, if we can make it in the space edge, these Earth edges will benefit as well. Some of the same challenges. >> All right, we're out of time, but I gotta ask you. Meg stopped by yesterday, and was giving great support for the intelligence. >> She has, yes. >> The company's now reporting the intelligent edge is gonna be one of the main areas. What about the new guy? Antonio. >> Antonio Neri. >> You know, what's your relationship with him, experience? Has he been focused on this area? >> Support? >> He's been great, he supports in three ways, let me just sum up in three ways. Number one, he supports in customer visits. He and I have been on customer visits together, it's always wonderful to have the president and now the new CEO with you affirming what we're doing. That's number one of three, number two of three, he supports the work we're doing with our new global IoT innovation labs, in fact our first grand opening, the first one in Houston, we will have one in Singapore opening in February, and then we'll have one in Europe and perhaps one in India, we're opening these labs for innovation, but my point is, the one in Houston, our first grand opening, Antonio Neri came personally and did the ribbon cutting and sponsored that as well. And then third, he is of course funding my business unit, and he's been very, very supportive and I'm really happy that he's staying with us and he'll be CEO. >> Excellent, Dr. Tom, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations, as you say, I know there's a long way to go, but looks like you're off to a great start and have some real traction. >> Tom: Thank you very much. >> So we appreciate your time and your insights. Okay, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Madrid. Be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

(jazzy intro music) [Narrator] Live from New York, it's the Cube! Covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts: Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We've been covering, all morning, the IBM Machine Learning announcement. Essentially what IBM did is they brought Machine Learning to the z platform. My co-host and I, Stu Miniman, have been talking to a number of guests, and we're going to do a quick wrap here. You know, Stu, my take is, when we first heard about this, and the world first heard about this, we were like, "Eh, okay, that's nice, that's interesting." But what it underscores is IBM's relentless effort to continue to keep z relevant. We saw it with the early Linux stuff, we're now seeing it with all the OpenSource and Spark tooling. You're seeing IBM make big positioning efforts to bring analytics and transactions together, and the simple point is, a lot of the world's really important data runs on mainframes. You were just quoting some stats, which were pretty interesting. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, you know, one of the biggest challenges we know in IT is migrating. Moving from one thing to another is really tough. I love the comment from Barry Baker. Well, if I need to change my platform, by the time I've moved it, that whole digital transformation, we've missed that window. It's there. We know how long that takes: months, quarters. I was actually watching Twitter, and it looks like Chris Maddern is here. Chris was the architect of Venmo, which my younger sisters, all the millennials that I know, everybody uses Venmo. He's here, and he was like, "Almost all the banks, airlines, and retailers "still run on mainframes in 2017, and it's growing. "Who knew?" You've got a guy here that's developing really cool apps that was finding this interesting, and that's an angle I've been looking at today, Dave, is how do you make it easy for developers to leverage these platforms that are already there? The developers aren't going to need to care whether it's a mainframe or a cloud or x86 underneath. IBM is giving you the options, and as a number of our guests said, they're not looking to solve all the problems here. Here's taking this really great, new type of application using Machine Learning and making it available on that platform that so many of their customers already use. >> Right, so we heard a little bit of roadmap here: the ML for z goes GA in Q1, and then we don't have specific timeframes, but we're going to see Power platform pick this up. We heard from Jean-Francois Puget that they'll have an x86 version, and then obviously a cloud version. It's unclear what that hybrid cloud will look like. It's a little fuzzy right now, but that's something that we're watching. Obviously a lot of the model development and training is going to live in the cloud, but the scoring is going to be done locally is how the data scientists like to think about these things. So again, Stu, more mainframe relevance. We've got another cycle coming soon for the mainframe. We're two years into the z13. When IBM has mainframe cycles, it tends to give a little bump to earnings. Now, granted, a smaller and smaller portion of the company's business is mainframe, but still, mainframe drags a lot of other software with it, so it remains a strategic component. So one of the questions we get a lot is what's IBM doing in so-called hardware? Of course, IBM says it's all software, but we know they're still selling boxes, right? So, all the hardware guys, EMC, Dell, IBM, HPE, et cetera. A lot of software content, but it's still a hardware business. So there's really two platforms there: there's the z and there's the Power. And those are both strategic to IBM. It sold its x86 business because it didn't see it as strategic. They just put Bob Picciano in charge of the Power business, so there's obviously real commitments to those platforms. Will they make a dent in the market share numbers? Unclear. It looks like it's steady as she goes, not dramatic increase in share. >> Yeah, and Dave, I didn't hear anybody come in here and say this offering is going to say, well let me dump x86 and go buy mainframe. That's not the target that I heard here. I would have loved to hear a little bit more as to where this fits into the broader IOT strategy. We talked a little bit on the intro, Dave. There's a lot of reasons why data's going to stick at the edge when we look at the numbers. For the huge growth of public cloud, the amount of data in public cloud hasn't caught up to the equivalent of what it would be in data centers itself. What I mean by that is, we usually spend, say 30% on average for storage costs inside a data center. If we look at public cloud, it's more around 10%. So, at AWS Reinvent, I talked to a number of the ecosystem partners, that started to see things like data lakes starting to appear in the cloud. This solution isn't in the data lake family, but it's with the analytics and everything that's happening with streaming and machine learning. It's large repositories of data and huge transactions of data that are happening in the mainframe, and just trying to squint through where all the data lives, and the new waves of technologies coming in. We heard how this can tie into some of the mobile and streaming activities that aren't on the mainframe, so that it can pull them into the other decisions, but some broader picture that I'm sure IBM will be able to give in the future. >> Well, normally you would expect a platform that is however many decades old the mainframe is, after the whole mainframe downsizing trend, you would expect there would be a managed decline in that business. I mean, you're seeing it in a lot of places now. We've talked about this, with things like Symmetrics, right? You minimize and focus the R&D investments, and you try to manage cost, you manage the decline of the business. IBM has almost sort of flipped that. They say, okay, we've got DB2, we're going to continue to invest in that platform. We've got our major subsystems, we're going to enhance the platform with Open Source technologies. We've got a big enough base that we can continue to mine perpetually. The more interesting thing to me about this announcement is it underscores how IBM is leveraging its analytics platform. So, we saw the announcement of the Watson Data Platform last September, which was sort of this end-to-end data pipeline collaboration between different persona engine, which is quite unique in the marketplace, a lot of differentiation there. Still some services. Last week at Spark Summit, I talked to some of the users and some of the partners of the Watson Data Platform. They said it's great, we love it, it's probably the most robust in the marketplace, but it's still a heavy lift. It still requires a fair amount of services, and IBM's still pushing those services. So IBM still has a large portion of the company still a services company. So, not surprising there, but as I've said many many times, the challenge IBM has is to really drive that software business, simplify the deployment and management of that software for its customers, which is something that I think it's working hard on doing. And the other thing is you're seeing IBM leverage those platforms, those analytics platforms, into different hardware segments, or hardware/cloud segments, whether it's BlueMix, z, Power, so, pushing it out through the organization. IBM still has a stack, like Oracle has a stack, so wherever it can push its own stack, it's going to do that, cuz the margins are better. At the same time, I think it understands very well, it's got to have open source choice. >> Yeah, absolutely, and that's something we heard loud and clear here, Dave, which is what we expect from IBM: choice of language, choice of framework. When I hear the public cloud guys, it's like, "Oh, well here's kind of the main focus we have, "and maybe we'll have a little bit of choice there." Absolutely the likes of Google and Amazon are working with open source, but at least first blush, when I look at things, it looks like once IBM fleshes this out -- and as we've said, it's the Spark to start and others that they're adding on -- but IBM could have a broader offering than I expect to see from some of the public cloud guys. We'll see. As you know, Dave, Google's got their cloud event in a couple of weeks in San Francisco. We'll be covering that, and of course Amazon, you expect their regular cadence of announcements that they'll make. So, definitely a new front in the Cloud Wars as it were, for machine learning. >> Excellent! Alright, Stu, we got to wrap, cuz we're broadcasting the livestream. We got to go set up for that. Thanks, I really appreciate you coming down here and co-hosting with me. Good event. >> Always happy to come down to the Big Apple, Dave. >> Alright, good. Alright, thanks for watching, everybody! So, check out SiliconAngle.com, you'll get all the new from this event and around the world. Check out SiliconAngle.tv for this and other CUBE activities, where we're going to be next. We got a big spring coming up, end of winter, big spring coming in this season. And check out WikiBon.com for all the research. Thanks guys, good job today, that's a wrap! We'll see you next time. This is theCUBE, we're out. (jazzy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, this is theCUBE, covering Spark Summit East 2017, brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts, David Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Back to Boston, everybody, where the city is bracing for a big snowstorm. Still euphoric over the Patriots' big win. Aaron Colcord is here, he's the director of engineering at FIS Global, and he's joined by Dave Favela, who's the director of BI at FIS Global. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. It's good to see you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming on. So Dave, set it up. FIS Global, the company that does a ton of work in financial services that nobody's ever heard of. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, we serve and touch virtually every credit union or bank in the United States, and have services that extend globally, and that ranges anywhere from back office services to technology services that we provide by way of mobile banking or online banking. And so, we're a Fortune 500 company with a reach, like I said, throughout the nation and globally. >> So, you're a services company that provides, sort of, end-to-end capabilities for somebody who wants to start a bank, or upgrade their infrastructure? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, whether you're starting a bank or whether you're an existing bank looking to offer some type of technology, whether it's back-end processing services, mobile banking, bill pay, peer-to-peer payments, so, we are considered a FinTech company, and one of the largest FinTech companies there is. >> And Aaron, your role as the director of engineering, maybe talk about that a little bit. >> My role is primarily about the mobile data analytics, about creating a product that's able to not only be able to give the basic behavior of our mobile application, but be able to actually dig deeper and create interesting analytics, insights into the data, to give our customers understanding about not only the mobile application, but be able to even, as we're building right now, a use case for being able to take action on that data. >> So, I mean, mobile obviously is sweeping the banking industry by storm, I mean, banks have always been, basically, IT companies, when you think about it, a huge component of IT, but now mobile comes in and, maybe talk a little bit about, sort of the big drivers in the business, and how, you know, mobile is fitting in. >> Absolutely. So, first of all, you see a shift that's happening with the end user: you, David, as a user of mobile banking, right? You probably have gone to the branch maybe once in the last 90 days, but have logged into mobile banking 10 times. So, we've seen anywhere from an eight to nine time shift in usage and engagement on the digital channel, and what that means is, more interactions and more touch points that the bank is getting off of the consumer behavior. And so, what we're trying to do here is turn that into getting to know the customer profile better, so that they could better serve in this digital channel, where there's a lot more interactions occurring. >> Yeah, I mean, you look at the demographic, too. I mean, my kids don't even use cheques. Right, I mean, it's all, everything's done on mobile, Venmo, or whatever, the capabilities they have. So, what's the infrastructure behind that that enables it? I mean, it can't be what it used to be. I mean, probably back-end still is, but what else do you have to create to enable that? >> Well, it's been a tremendous amount of transformation on the back-ends over the last ten years, and particularly when we talk about how that interaction has changed, from becoming a more formal experience to becoming a more intimate experience through the mobile client. But, more specifically to the back-end, we have actually implemented Apache Spark as one of our platforms, to actually help transform and move the data faster. Mobile actually creates a tremendous amount of back-end activity, sometimes even more than what we were able to see in other channels. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, if you just kind of step back a little bit, this is about core banking, right, and as you speak to IT systems, and so, if you think about all the transactions that happen on the daily, whether you're in branch, at ATM, on a mobile device, it's processed through a core banking system, and so one of the challenges that, I think, this industry and FinTech is up against is that, you've got all these legacy old systems that have been built that can't compute all this data at a fast enough rate, and so for us, bringing in Aaron, this is about, how do you actually leverage new technology, and take the technical data of the old systems, data schemas and models, and marry the two to provide data, key data that's been generated. >> Dave: Without shutting down the business. >> Without shutting down the business. >> Because that's the hard part. >> Can you elaborate on that, because that's non-trivial. It used to be when banks merged, it could take years for the back-off of systems to come together. So now, let's say a bank comes to you, they have their, I don't want to say legacy systems, it's the systems they've built up over time, but they want the more modern capabilities. How do you marry the two? >> Would you take a first stab? >> Well, it is actually a very complicated process, because you always have to try to understand data itself, and how to put those two things together. More specifically on the mobile client, because of the way that we are able to think about how data can be transformed and transported, we came up with a very flexible mechanism to allow data to actually be interpreted on the fly, and processed, so that when you talk about two different banks, by transforming it into this type of format, we're able to kind of reinterpret it and process it. >> Would this be, could you think of this as a very, very smart stream processor that, where ETL would be at the most basic layer, and then you're adding meaning to the data so that it shows up to the mobile client in a way that coheres to the user model that the user is experiencing on their device? >> I think that's a really good way of putting it, yeah. I mean, there's a, we like to think of it, I call it a semantic layer, of how you, one, treat ETL as one process, and then you have a semantic layer that you basically transform the bottom bits, so to speak, into components that you can then assemble semantically so that it starts making sense to the end user. >> And to that point, you know, to your integration question, it is very challenging, because you're trying to marry the old with the new, and we'll tease the section for tomorrow in which Aaron will talk about that, but for us, at enterprise grade, it has to be done very cautiously, right? And we're under heavy regulation and compliance and security, and so, it's not about abandoning the old, right? It's trying to figure out, how do we take that, what's been in place and been stable, and then couple it with the new technology that we're introducing. >> Which is interesting conversation, the old versus new, and I look at your title, Dave, and it's got 'BI' in it. I remember I interviewed Christian Chabot, who was then CEO of Tableau, and he's like, "Old, slow, BI", okay, now you guys are here talking about Spark. Spark's all about real-time and speed and memory, and everything else. Talk about the transformation in your role as this industry has transformed. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, when we think about business intelligence and creating that intelligence layer, we elected the mobile channel, right? Because we're seeing that most inner activities happen there. So for us, an intelligent BI solution is not just, you know, data management and analytics platform. There has to be the fulfillment. You talk a lot about actioning on your data. So for us, it's, if we could actually create, you know, intelligence layer to analytics level, how can we feed marketing solutions with this intelligence to have the full circle and insights back? I believe, the gentlemen, they were talking about the RISE Lab in this morning session. >> Dave: The follow-on to AMP, basically. >> Yeah, exactly. So, there it was all about that feedback loop, right? And so, for us, when we think about BI, the whole loop is from data management to end-to-end marketing solutions, and then back, so that we can serve the mobile customer. >> Well, so, you know, the original promise of the data warehouse was this 365, what you just described, right? And being able to effect business outcomes, and that is now the promise of so-called big data, even though people don't really like that term anymore, so, my question is, is it same line, new bottle, or is it really transformational? Are we going to live up to that challenge this time around? As practitioners, I'd really love your input on that. >> I think I'd love to expand on that. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's, I think it's a whole new bottle and a whole new wine. David here is from wine country, and, there's definitely the, data warehouse introduced the important concepts, of which is a tremendous foundation for us to stand on. You know, you always like to stand on the shoulders of giants. It introduced a concept, but in the case of marrying the new with the old, there's a tremendous extra third dimension, okay? So, we have a velocity dimension when we start talking about Apache Spark. We can accelerate it, make it go quick, and we can get that data. There's another aspect there when we start talking about, for example, hey, different banks have different types of way that they like to talk to it, so now we're kind of talking about, there's variation in people's data, and Apache Spark, actually, is able to give that capability to process data that is different than each other, and then being able to marry it, down the pipe, together. And then the additional, what I think is actually making it into a new wine is, when we start talking about data, the traditional mechanism, data warehousing, that 360 view of the customer, they were thinking more of data as in, I like to think of it as, let's count beans, right? Let's just come up with what how many people were doing X, how many were doing this? >> Dave: Accurate reporting, yeah. >> Exactly, and if you think about it, it was driving the business through the rear-view mirror, because all you had to do was base it off of the historical information, and that's how we're going to drive the business. We're going to look in the rear-view mirror, we're going to look at what's been going on, and then we're going to see what's going on. And I think the transformation here is taking technologies and being able to say, how do we put not only predictive analytics inside play, but how do we actually allow the customer to take control and actually move forward? And then, as well, expand those use cases for variation, use that same technology to look for, between the data points, are there more data points that can be actually derived and moved forward on? >> George, I loved that description. You have, in one of your reports, I remember, George had this picture of this boat, and he said, "Oh, imagine trying to drive the boat", and it was looking at the wake (laughs), you know, right? Rather than looking in the rear-view mirror. >> But in addition to that, yeah, it's like driving the rear-view mirror, but you also said something interesting about, sort of, I guess the words I used to use were anticipating and influencing the customer. >> Aaron: Exactly. >> Can you talk about how much of that is done offline, like scoring profiles, and how much of that is done in real-time with the customer? >> Go ahead. >> Well, a lot of it still is still being done offline, mostly because, you know, as trying to serve a bank, you have to also be able to serve their immediate needs. So, really, we're evolving to actually build that use case around the real-time. We actually do have the technology already in place. We built the POCs, we built the technology inside, we're being able to move real-time, and we're ready to go there. >> So, what will be the difference? Me as a consumer, how will that change my experience? >> I think that would probably be best for you. >> Yeah, well, just got to step back a little bit, too, because, you know, what we're representing here is the digital channel mobile analytics, right? But, there's other areas within FIS Global that handles real-time payments with real-time analytics, such as a credit card division, right? So, both are happening sort of in parallel right now. For us, from our perspective on the mobile and digital front, the experience and how that's going to change is that, if you were a bank, and as a bank or a credit union you're receiving this behavioral data from our product, you want to be able to offer up better services that meet your consumer profile, right? And so, from our standpoint, we're working with other teams within FIS Global via Spark and Cloud, to essentially get that holistic profile to offer up those services that are more targeted, that are, I think, more meaningful to the consumer when they're in the mobile banking application. >> So, does FIS provide that sort of data service, that behavioral service, sort of as a turnkey service, or as a service, or is that something that you sort of teach the bank or the credit union how to fish? >> That's a really good question. We stated our mission statement as helping these institutions, creating a culture of being data-driven, right? So, give them the taste of data in a way that, you know, democratizing data, if you will, as we talked about this morning. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> That concept's really important to us, because with that comes, give FIS more data, right? Send them more data, or have them teach us how to manage all this data, to have a data science experience, where we can go in and play with the data to create our own sub-targeting, because our belief is that, you know, our clients know their customers the best, so we're here to serve them with tools to do that. >> So, I want to come back to the role of Spark. I mean, Hadoop was profound, right, I mean, shipped five megabytes of code, a petabyte a day, no doubt about it. But at the same time, it was a heavy lift. It still is a heavy lift. So talk about the role of Spark in terms of catalyzing that vision that we've been talking about. >> Oh, definitely. So, Apache Spark, when we talk in terms of big data, big data got started with Hadoop, and MapReduce was definitely an interesting concept, but Apache Spark really lifted and accelerates the entire vision of big data. When you look at, for example, MapReduce, you need to go get a team of trained engineers, who are typically going to work in a lower level language like Java, and they no longer focus in on what the business objectives are. They're focusing on the programming objectives, the requirements. With Spark, because it takes a more high-level abstraction of how we process data, it means that you're more focusing on, what's the actual business case? How are we actually abstracting the data? How are we moving data? But then it also gives you that same capability to go inside the actual APIs, get a little bit lower, to modify it for what's your specific needs. So, I think the true transformation with Apache Spark is basically allowing us, now, like for example, in the presentation this morning, it was, there's a lot of people who are using Scala. We use Scala, ourselves. There's now a lot of people who are using Python, and everybody's using SQL. How does SQL, something that has survived so robustly for almost 30, 40 years, still keep on coming back like a boomerang on us? And it's because a language composed of four simple keywords is just so easy to use, and so descriptive and declarative, that allows us to actually just concentrate on the business, and I think that's actually the acceleration that Apache Spark actually brings to the business, is being able to just focus in on what you're actually trying to do, and focus in on your objectives, and it actually lowers the actual, that same team of engineers that you're using for MapReduce now become extremely more productive. I mean, when I look at the number of lines of codes that we had to do to figure out machine learning and Hadoop, to the amount of lines that you have to do in Apache Spark, it's tremendously, it's like, five lines in Apache Spark, 30 in MapReduce, and the system just responds and gives it to you a hundred times faster. >> Why Spark, too? I mean, Spark, when we saw it two years ago, to your point of this tidal wave of data, we saw more mobile phone adoption, we saw those people that were on mobile banking using it more, logging in more, and then we're seeing the proliferation of devices, right, in IoT, so for us, these are all these interaction and data points that is a tsunami that's coming our way, so that's when we strategically elected to go Spark, so we could handle the volume and compute storage- >> And Aaron, what you just described is, all the attention used to be on just making it work, and now it's putting to work, is really- >> Aaron: Right, exactly. >> You're seeing that in your businesses. >> Quick question. Do you see, now that you have this, sort of, lower and lower latency analytics and ability to access more of the, what previously were data silos, do you see services that are possible that banks couldn't have thought of before, beyond just making different products recommended at the appropriate moment, are there new things that banks can offer? >> It's interesting. On one hand, you free up their time from an analysis standpoint, to where they could actually start to get out of the weeds to think about new products and services, so, from that component, yes. From the standpoint of seeing pattern recognition in the data, and seeing what it can do aside from target marketing, our products are actually often used by our product owners internally to understand, what are the consumers doing on the device, so that they could actually come up with better services to ultimately serve them, aside from marketing solutions. >> Notwithstanding your political affiliations, we won't go there, but there's certainly a mood of, and a trend toward, deregulation, that's presumably good news for the financial services industry. Can you comment on that, or, what's the narrative going on in your customer base? Are they excited about fewer regulations, or is that just all political nonsense? Any thoughts? >> Yeah (laughs), you know, on one hand, why people come to FIS is because we do adhere to a compliance and regulation standpoint, right? >> Dave: Complexity is your friend, then (laughs). >> Absolutely, right, so they can trust us in that regard, right? And so, from our vantage point, will it go away entirely? No, absolutely not, right. I think Cloud introduces a whole new layer of complexity, because how do you handle Cloud computing and NPI, and PII data in the Cloud, and our customers look to us to make sure that, first and foremost, security for the end consumer is in place, and so, but I think it's an interesting question, and one that you are seeing end users click through without even viewing agreements or whatnot, they just want to get to product, right? So, you know, will it go away, or do we see it going away? No, but ... >> You guys don't read all that text, do you? (laughing) >> No comment? >> Required, required to. >> You know, no matter where it goes with the politics, I think there's a theme over the last 10 years, and the 10 years before. Things are transforming, things are evolving in ways, and sometimes going extremely, extremely fast in ways that we don't, surely can't anticipate. I think, if we were to think about just a mobile application, or the mobile bank experience 10 years ago, all we wanted was just to be able to see just the bank balance, and now we're able to take that same application and not only see our bank balance, but be able to deposit our cheque, or even replace the card in our pocket completely, with the mobile app, and I think we're going to see the exact same types of transformations over the industry over the next 10 years. Whether or not it's more regulation or different regulation, I think it's going to still speak to the same services, which FIS is there to help deliver. >> Yeah, and you're right, there are going to be new regulations, because they'll evolve, maybe out with the old, in with the new, you see, and global regulations are on run book, and you've got your Cloud, there's data locality, and you know, it's never-ending. That's great for your business. Fantastic. >> It comes down to trust, ultimately, right? I mean, they still, our customers still go to banks and credit unions because they trust them with their data, if you will, or their online currency, in some regards. So, you know, that's not going to change. >> Right, yeah. Well, Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, it was great to have you. >> Thanks so much for talking with us. >> Absolutely, good luck with everything. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Boston, Spark Summit East, #SparkSummit. Be right back. >> I remember, when I had such a fantastic batting practice-